The Long Game

How Make Ink got made with book designer and artist John Gall

Don’t you love these book covers? A long time ago in my other life I was awarded the somewhat embarrassing sounding moniker of ‘Young Gun’ by The American Institute of Graphic Arts which introduced me to a whole world of designers and illustrators and art directors in New York, and I especially remember seeing at the show a series of Nabokov book jacket designs that were shadow boxes, not collages but assemblages made by all different artists. The book covers were slightly scientific; like specimen boxes, and slightly dreamy; like Joseph Cornel boxes, handmade and strange and sweet and made you want to put your hand into them. The series was art directed by John Gall who’s signature move seems to be listening to the artists and books and then putting together a package that is tactile and layered that somehow delights not just in its subject matter, but also in its own making as an object. All this to say, I was thrilled when John Gall, who I’d never met or talked to, DM’d me on instagram asking if we could make a book out of the Toronto Ink Company instagram account. I said yes and even as I said it I was wondering what exactly I was saying yes to.

I visited the Abrams offices before my book came out and gave John a vial of a West Village acorn cap Red Hook rusty bed-spring ink. This is what he did with it.

John had moved from jacket design to commissioning visual books for Abrams and we put together a pitch and then signed a contract and he flew up to Toronto and visited my studio, my favourite foraging spots, and my favourite used bookstore. We had lunch and then he got back on the plane to New York. That’s when I realized we didn’t really talk about what exactly I supposed to do to make this book. I did have one guiding principle which is that I wanted to make the book that I wished I had when I first started making ink. Also, I really liked the format of the recent Favikan cookbook. I was hoping to make a guidebook with some secrets and some possibilities, something that could spark a connection between materials and meaning and I wanted it to have the feeling of a network of colour experimenters that had been so important to me from the beginning of the Toronto Ink Company.

A few years and a lot of work later and really living inside an incredible collaboration with the photographer Lauren Kolyn, I had a book called Make Ink. John worked with some great designers and ran a bunch of printing tests on different papers but mostly he just kept saying yes to my choices and kept saying “keep going” when I got stuck, and then, at the very end, “How about this?” and he added a dyed edge to the book that gave it just the otherworldly and handmade and covetousness that it needed. I kept waiting though for the stroke of genius from this guy whose work I have been admiring for years or at least a moment where I would learn some secret trick of bookmaking. And like so many of the best secrets, his was hiding in plain sight. What John had been doing the whole time we worked together was a kind of gardening. A year after Make Ink came out Aprilsnow published John Gall Collages 2008-2018 in Korea. In it you see the quiet power of his artwork which reimagines the ruins old stories and pictures and typography through subtle snips and manoeuvrings and gluings. The works undo one meaning in order to bring to the surface something else. And to me, a former collaborator and lifelong fan, it seems the something else of John Gall’s genius is more than good design or clever juxtaposition or even beautiful art, but a kind of crystallization of care. And whatever your work, that might be enough.

Collages, Artwork, bookcover all https://www.johngalldesign.com/JG

And… In the Colour Lab. Some of my favourite outtakes from Make Ink. All photographs from the brilliant camera eye of https://www.laurenkolynstudio.com/.

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