Publisher is a hands-on group

Crumpled Press binds books one at a time.

By: Lacey Korevec
   In a second-floor apartment on North Main Street, New York City resident Jordan McIntyre knelt in front of an old coffee table to secure the naked body of an unbound book in place with stray pieces of wood and two orange vises.
   "We here at The Crumpled Press like to do things the old-fashioned way," he said, as he stood up and got ready to drill a hole through the small stack of papers.
   Mr. McIntyre works there often, along with Nicholas Jahr, a Brooklyn resident, and Alex Bick, who lives in the Cranbury apartment. As editors for The Crumpled Press, a publishing company they started together in 2005, they publish books by putting them together by hand: they print the text, cut the paper, sew the pages together and bind them to covers with hot glue, right in Mr. Bick’s apartment.
   "It’s nice to use your hands and have something at the end of the day that you produced," Mr. Bick said. "But I think we’re trying to sort of go back to an earlier time where things were made by hand and with a lot of care."
   The Crumpled Press has published five books in the past two years. Cranbury resident and Princeton University student J. Nealin Parker’s book, "Take a Right at the Tank & Other Ways to Get Home," is the most recent work the Press has published.
   Ms. Parker will be reading selections from her book Saturday at 6 p.m. at The Cranbury Bookworm on North Main Street. The book is a compilation of journal entries she wrote while working as an elections consultant in Liberia. It also features original drawings and photographs.
   Mr. McIntyre said he came up with the idea for the company after he self-published his own poetry in a book titled "Still Leaves," which his mother bound by sewing the pages together with yarn. He and his friends then decided to start The Crumpled Press to publish literature that may not otherwise have a chance at being published by larger companies.
   Mr. McIntyre compared the current, mainstream publishing system to the process of running in beauty pageants.
   "When you’re in a beauty pageant, you try out for Miss South Dakota and then Miss America and then you go to Miss Universe," he said. "And there’s sort of a singular standard that gets passed down through that system. So, what we’re trying to do is figure out ways of publishing and distributing that don’t feed into that system. So, we don’t believe that writing is written for a contest or anything like that and we’re not trying to sell to any specific demographic or system of the market."
   Since the editors are producing the books with their own printers, paper cutters and thread, The Crumpled Press is able to publish literature on its own schedule, producing available copies immediately after the works are completed, Mr. McIntyre said. Their books are available at a number of bookstores in New York, as well as at The Cranbury Bookworm and at Glen Echo Books and Micawber Books, both on Nassau Street in Princeton.
   One of their recent publications serves as an example of this. It’s a series of Web log entries posted by Sgt. McGee, of the Marine Corps Reserves, while he served in Fallujah, Iraq. The book, titled "When I Wished I Was Here: Dispatches from Fallujah," allows people to read about Sgt. McGee’s personal experiences in Iraq in the midst of the current conflict, Mr. McIntyre said.
   "It’s not a directly political text," he said. "What it does do is it shows you how it would affect somebody and what it is to the soldiers. We all say we support the soldiers, yet we don’t really acknowledge what they’re going through."
   So far, The Crumpled Press has produced 400 copies of Sergeant McGee’s 34-page book.
   Mr. Bick, who is working toward earning his history doctorate at Princeton University, said the group holds "book-binding parties" every few weeks to help with production
   "It’s labor intensive but it’s also a lot of fun because we invite the author to join us and we invite other people who are interested in the process," he said. "Where machines make books very quickly, it takes probably an evening to make 100 books and that’s with a group of people involved."
   A simple book can get put together in about 10 minutes, he said. But their newest one, "Take a Right at the Tank & Other Ways Home," takes a bit longer to assemble.
   "That book takes probably about an hour per book," he said. "And that includes all the steps. Printing. The paper has to be cut. Then it has to be drilled through. And then it has to be sewn. And then that product has to be bound into the cover with hot glue, essentially. Then the edges need to be re-cut so that you can get a clean edge."
   That’s because the design of Ms. Parker’s book cover is more sophisticated than the other books the company has published. It features a small, square window that needs to be hand cut to display a photograph underneath that was taken by Ms. Parker.
   Designing the way each book will be printed is always a process that involves the author, Mr. Bick said.
   "We try out different kinds of paper, different fonts and different arrangements so that the product is beautiful in the end," he said.
   For more information on The Crumpled Press or to purchase its books, visit the company’s Web site at www.crumpledpress.org.