I posted a little bit ago about an event Chicago’s Front Forty Press had at designer furniture store Luminaire. I got to interview the head of Front Forty, Doug Fogelson, for a profile in URB Magazine. He’s a bit spacey, tripped out and an artist to his core - really fun and delightful to talk to. Before the interview started he talked about vacationing in Arizona and feeling ill because he was walking barefoot on grounds that eminated bad energy. That should give you an idea. Here’s a shortened version of that interview.
Enjoy!
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How did Front Forty Press start?
Yeah that’s always the first question, and it’s kind of a cool story in the sense that it started off as a virtual publishing house website. I wanted to make books online at a time when there weren’t a lot of e-books and the web was just starting to get a little more dynamic in that area. The idea was to use the web as a free resource for viewing of art and reading things and listening to music and then to play off what the web could do by calling Front Forty Press a press even though it was online. Our first book project was Sonneteer, which was geared towards liberating graphic designers from their day jobs, usually a lot of advertising and corporate stuff, and then asking them to focus on the built world and utilize their skills as graphic designers in the space of the computer with supplied images and whatever else they wanted to bring into it. They were assigned chapters of subject matter like infrastructure, windows and doors, pathways, sprawl, these kinds of things. So this was all done over the Internet and when they came back with their finished files, the stuff was looking really cool and that was the first e-book we had up on the site.
So when did the leap happen from creating e-books to printed books?
Inner City Light was the first off-line project. We linked up with Inner City Light (an organization that promotes awareness of ethnic and cultural differences via digital youth media) and designer David Castillo to design a brochure pro-bono for them. It was originally intended as another e-project but it turned out so cool we thought, you know, we have to print up copies of this and give all the profits to Inner City Light to help their cause. So that was done in 2004 and then right afterwards we started working on the Graffitecture book and when we were gathering all the artists, the photographs to be drawn on and everything else, we knew we had to print up copies to put into these guys’ hands. Shortly after that was Short Stories Illustrated by Artists and when we started seeing what the artists were giving us and we saw how good it was, we decided that even if we had to print on demand, one way or another we had to create physical, tangible books to give to our artists whether they ended up in the marketplace or not. Coincidentally at the same time we were also working on another book called Matt Volla’s Unruly Drawings and so it was luck that all these projects were finished around the same time and we were able to push things out in early 2007. Because of that we were able to secure our debut at P.S.1 MoMA in the fine print/alternative media series.
How are people responding to the books so far?
We’ve been getting really good responses not only on content but on the design and production of the books. We put a lot of care into the design and production value of the books and we often get praised for it so it feels good that people recognize small things like our font work. As far as content, we’ve been rewarded by winning awards like best design 2007 for Graffitecture from the Hollywood Book Festival .
One of the interesting things about the books is that they’re not purely art books but they touch on different subcultures and ideologies making them accessible to a much wider pool of people.
People try to figure out who we are and what we’re about. If we think something is interesting enough and we want to make a book out of it and work with other artists, we wind up with something we think is cool and we feel other people will like it whether they’re in art, literature, activism…it could be anything. It’s a pretty big roll of the dice sometimes, financially and otherwise. At our core we’re about the cultivation and communication of ideas.
And along with that, the books tend to inadvertently bridge a lot of gaps.
It’s a beautiful thing to be able to do that. Take Sonneteer, which design-wise appears like a piano book, and then it’s about the built world which is urban in nature, infrastructure and all that stuff, and then it’s design, and then it relates back to the sonnet, which is a weird old type of prose. So you’ve got this amalgamation of all these things together and people have really responded to it, I’m surprised. Graffitecture on the other hand was much more a thesis – what would happen if graffiti artists were given high-end interior spaces to do their thing on and were allowed the freedom to do whatever they wanted? It was regional, it was very specific and we wanted to attack it intellectually as well with our four essayists. But Sonneteer, that was early on and I think we’re getting better at focusing in. So what though if it’s a collection of disparate elements? We dig it.
So now that Front Forty is getting some steam behind it what are the ultimate goals in terms of circulation, publishing and future topics?
Well, we are rolling hardcore. 2007 was our debut and it was really good, we learned through everything we did. We’re super excited about the next two poetry books that are coming up and we’re putting a lot of energy and investment into them. In terms of getting them out there what we were able to do this time was get a distributor under contract through the University of Chicago Press. They were our best fit as they’re non-profit, in our backyard and they’re the largest university press in the country. Distributing through them means our 2008 books are going to be marketed and distributed in a whole different way.
So will I be able to walk into a Borders and find Graffitecture?
Yes. And that was our main reason for going with the University of Chicago press. Right now you can find it by requesting it at bookstores or finding it on Amazon.com but being with the UIC press, we are now linked into the main distribution hubs in the country and it will be so much easier to find older titles and our newest ones. We’ve been able to get the books into museum stores and independent shops on our own and so we want to stay focused on the cool shit on our end. We want the books in odd places in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and in the Borders and Barnes & Noble.
What is the one thing you’re most excited about for the press?
We have a book coming out called Signs of the Apocalypse or Rapture. It’s more for the typical museum bookstore art book buyer and its split into three categories. The written side which is transcripts from all these end times interviews with scientists and religious academics. The visual is a curated selection of works from contemporary artists like Bill Viola, categorized into either apocalyptic or rapturous images. We have a sick lineup of artists. The last component of the book is an audio CD, which is also split into the two categories of apocalypse and rapture with everything from metal to recordings of end of the world rants and experimental artists like Michael Boyd. It’s about seeing a potential vision of the future. It’s a heavy book.
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