Jennifer Yoffy  00:08

I'm Jennifer Yoffy, the founder and publisher of Yoffy Press in Atlanta, Georgia. This is a podcast where we talk to artists about their journey, how they got where they are, what right and wrong turns they made along the way, and where they're heading next. David Chickey is the publisher, designer and editorial director of Radius Books, a nonprofit publishing company based in Santa Fe. He co-founded Radius Books in 2007 with a mission to encourage, promote and publish books of artistic and cultural value. Radius titles have received national recognition, including multiple awards from AIGA American Association of Museums Publishing, and Best Book nominations from the New Yorker, Time PDN, Smithsonian, Independent Publisher, and the Paris Photo Aperture Foundation. Chickey is the former Board Chair of the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, and a graduate of Sussex University England and UNC Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead scholar. Please welcome David Chickey to the podcast. How's it been going?

David Chickey  01:28

Busy, busy. How about you?

Jennifer Yoffy  01:31

Same, busy. Every book is delayed significantly. So that's fun.

David Chickey  01:37

Yeah, that's the reality right now. Craziness happening with everything - supply chain these days.

Jennifer Yoffy  01:43

Photo Eye, you know, wants to do the best books of 2021. And I was trying to look like every book I pulled out was not 2021. Like this surely has to have been recent? Nope, that's before now.

David Chickey  01:58

Yeah. Yeah, just I just had a book where I went to be on press well, for three books, and one of the papers that arrived was problematic.

Jennifer Yoffy  02:10

Oh, no.

David Chickey  02:11

And so, you know, paper is such a rare commodity these days that it's not like, if there's an issue with that paper, you can just substitute it with something else. I mean, it's, it's just not. So yeah. But we're getting delivery now of the books I printed in June.

Jennifer Yoffy  02:31

That sounds about right. Yeah, I've got some books that are finally stuck in customs. And I'm like, well, these they're closer.

David Chickey  02:43

So how many books do you work on?

Jennifer Yoffy  02:48

My goal is for it to be fewer than it is right now. (laughs) Yeah. I mean, it's been between like six and ten a year. And it's just me. So that's a lot. And I also have a full time job. So I kind of Yeah, I would like to scale back. It's part of the new..., the new new plan. (laughs)

David Chickey  03:19

We all have new new plans.

Jennifer Yoffy  03:20

Yeah, I mean, I'm really booked through like 2022. And now that these keep getting pushed, you know, I'm like, Okay, well, the new new plans probably gonna change 20 times by then. But I get excited about projects. And I'm like, Oh, I can do it. You know, like, this one's gonna be easy. It's like almost already designed and it's never, ever, ever any different. They all take a whole lot of time. But you guys do a ton now.

David Chickey  03:54

We do about 20.

Jennifer Yoffy  03:56

Yeah, that's what I thought.

David Chickey  03:57

Yeah. It varies. And then we didn't do 20 in 2020. You know, trying to figure out what was going on and restructure and shuffle. But what is the word everyone hates? Now we pivoted, we had to, we had to pivot? A little bit.

Jennifer Yoffy  04:21

Where do you print?

David Chickey  04:23

Italy? Mostly?

Jennifer Yoffy  04:24

Okay, but it kind of depends on the project?

David Chickey  04:29

It does. I mean, yeah, it mixes up.

Jennifer Yoffy  04:36

And have you printed Meghann Riepenhoff's newest one yet?

David Chickey  04:38

Yeah. We did. It printed a few weeks ago. Five weeks ago.

Jennifer Yoffy  04:48

Exciting.

David Chickey  04:49

Yeah, it's such beautiful work. Not easy to print. But so worth it.

Jennifer Yoffy  04:58

Yeah, yeah. And she is so wonderful to work with.

David Chickey  05:02

Yeah, she's amazing.

Jennifer Yoffy  05:03

Yeah. Yeah. Kind of like over the top. Amazing.

David Chickey  05:06

Yeah.

Jennifer Yoffy  05:08

So I have a bunch of questions for you are you ready? I can be ready. Oh, this is easy. Have we already started? (laughs) So I wanted to ask about Radius being a nonprofit. So it was founded in 2007, by you Darius Himes, and David Skolkin. And Joanna Hurley. And the idea is that it was a nonprofit publishing company that would work with public libraries. And I was curious, I wanted you to talk more about that, and how the 501 C3 status benefits the artists that you work with, from a fundraising perspective?

David Chickey  05:52

Yeah, really, it was, it was really born out of two kind of different experiences at the time. So when, when we started talking about, about Radius and about this idea of a publishing company, that wasn't not necessarily a nonprofit, we just started having conversations about were there ways to think about publishing books that were a little different than the way they were being done. Because all of us were working in and out of the publishing world. I was then working as a designer, mostly, but working for a lot of other for profit publishers. I wasn't calling them for profit publishers. But one of the things that kept coming up in those situations is that publishers making decisions that were, of course, protective of the bottom line, weren't necessarily always making decisions that were in the best interest of the artists. And so this idea of how do you get back or how do you get to a place where you can publish books from this perspective of how do you take an artist's vision and put it in book form? My background had always been in the art world and had been from museums and galleries, and I've worked in auction houses. So I had kind of a pretty broad spectrum understanding the art world and to whatever degree I could. And so when, when the four of us were talking about this, I came back to them and said, You know, I think that this could be structured as a nonprofit, because the model of art museum, doing essentially a similar kind of idea, which is to take an artist or an artist vision and put it on a platform that can be shared with a bigger audience, that, you know, we don't expect art museums, because almost all of the art museums that we know of now are, you know, structured as civic organizations, but they're nonprofits, and they don't exist based on the ticket price that you pay when you walk in the door. Sure, they fundraise for all of their programming and everything else they do. And I think one of the basic ideas is that publishing art books isn't much different than that concept.

Jennifer Yoffy  08:21

It's expensive. And the ticket price to a museum would be, you know, preventatively high, as would the per book cost if you were doing it straight out.

David Chickey  08:33

Very early on. A mentor for me in the publishing world, told me that their model was always predicated on no matter what kind of book they published. And this was not necessarily an art book publisher. This was somebody at Abrams, who had this perspective of a broad spectrum of books. But their bottom line concept was that they had to sell 3000 copies of any book that they published, in order to break even on that project. And if you look at this kind of crazy, wonderful burgeoning art photo book world, it's extraordinarily rare for a book to sell more than 3000 copies or up to 3000 copies. So that little piece of information tells you right there that if, if that's what they were thinking, and of course, they thought that you know, a novel that sells 3000 copies or a very expensive art book, of course, they make more money on a more expensive art book than they do on a novel. But that general sort of rule of thumb always applied. If we're living now in a world where I think all these incredible books that are being published by small publishers and independent publishers and people who are self publishing and all of these great things, they're not generally selling 3000 copies of the book, so the sale of the book itself is not going to fund the making of the book. So where do you get to that from other perspectives? How do you think about it? At the same time, I had gone to this publishing seminar and there was a panel discussion amongst some really good art book publishers. When you go back, and so this would have been Radiuses, 14 years old now, so this would have been 17-18 years ago. And if you go back 20-25 years ago, there were roughly 2500 libraries in this country. And the big art book publishers could count on the fact that every time they published a book, most of those libraries, especially the bigger ones would buy pretty much whatever they published, because they wanted to have them in their stacks. And that going back 20 years ago, was starting to disappear. And so this panel discussion was very much a group of publishers talking about the crisis, because if you think about it, if they could guarantee that they sold 1000, or 1500, copies to libraries, with any book, they published pretty much no matter what they published. They were headed towards 3000 copies being sold, you know, with this built in system.

Jennifer Yoffy  11:17

Sure. And was it going away, because libraries didn't have enough funding, or didn't have enough, a big enough budget anymore?

David Chickey  11:27

That's what they weren't talking about it. They weren't talking about the why they were just talking about the reality. And so listening to it, that was my question. I was like, Whoa, what's happening? Why is this happening? So doing a little research with` colleagues and libraries and trying to figure out what was going on, it became clear that it was largely because of funding cuts. And if you're a librarian and you're dealing with a big institution, and a big library and a big collection, and your acquisitions, money is going down, the easiest place to cut is at the top, the most expensive books, because that's the least number of books that you cut, right. And so, you know, a few years into Radius, there was a a librarian who oversaw most of the states acquisitions budget for a library and ended up it was, when we started, it was sometimes difficult to get librarians attention and say, This is what we're doing. And we really are wanting to give you great books. But when we finally got her attention, she called me one day, and she said, I'm so sorry for taking a while to understand what you're doing. But you should probably understand that I have not added a single art book to the entire network of libraries in seven years.

Jennifer Yoffy  12:43

Wow. Wow.

David Chickey  12:46

And so this idea that we were giving them books so that they could add them to the network and giving them quality books, not leftover books. You know, was, was really good. But it was, you know, I still remember when I went back to to, to Darius, and David and Joanna and said, I think maybe this could be a nonprofit, they really did think I was kind of crazy. And there have been many times over the years where I still do think that this idea is pretty crazy. It makes so much sense in a way. It's also as you can well imagine a huge amount of work.

Jennifer Yoffy  13:25

Whoa, hard, right? How much, in the kind of work that Radius does, what percentage of time are you guys spending in resources on fundraising versus publishing?

David Chickey  13:40

For me, because that's a main part of my role. So I, you know, I don't, I don't think in terms of titles, and we we work very closely as a team, there are six of us on the team now at Radius. But in the beginning, it was just, you know, a very small group of people, and we had no money to pay anyone. And it took me two and a half years to get the nonprofit status because of the applications process with the IRS. Yeah, my husband jokes with me, sometimes and says that I got a degree in, you know, I got a master's degree in understanding not for profit law, because of the negotiations of going through and like dealing and going through all that process. Which was fascinating. I mean, just that the history of that is so interesting, because Aperture is a nonprofit.

Jennifer Yoffy  14:31

Yeah, what is their...

David Chickey  14:33

So, you know, if you think about what they do, and they publish a magazine, and they have an exhibition space, and they have, you know, incredible history of publishing photo books, and they are structured as a nonprofit and got that not for profit status, what 60 plus years ago now? The fascinating thing about nonprofit law is that there is no precedent in IRS law. So you can't go to the IRS and say, I want to do exactly what Aperture is doing because they're a nonprofit. And there's no precedent. So you can't use that as an example. You can only say this is what I want to do. And then your case is judged on the merits of your case, regardless of what has happened in the past.

Jennifer Yoffy  15:20

Wow. So you were getting a lot of pushback or rejection?

David Chickey  15:25

Yeah, what the IRS agent that got assigned our case, I have multiple multiple conversations with her over the time that it took. And one of those conversations, she was concerned that we would end up publishing the next Harry Potter. That would sell millions of copies.

Jennifer Yoffy  15:48

Yeah, likely.

David Chickey  15:51

And that just didn't jive with what she thought the nonprofit should be. Now, there's never been an art book that sold like Harry Potter.

Jennifer Yoffy  16:02

No, not even close.

David Chickey  16:05

Not even a tiny, tiny fraction, right?

Jennifer Yoffy  16:08

Yeah, it would have to literally do magic, I think for that. (laughs)

David Chickey  16:14

So I mean, but but we did have to be careful to write into the bylaws of the organization to be sure that we were at least I mean, you know, I can see that it's the highly, insanely improbable, you know, eventuality that something like that could happen, but it but we had to be clear as to how we would handle that. If that did happen. What what are you going to do as a legitimate nonprofit in the face of that? Of course, it's never been a problem. But I think it's, it is interesting, you know, to sort of back up and think about another really interesting case, example is the University of California Press, which, as a lot of university presses operate under the auspices of the university itself, which is a nonprofit. So they're sort of, by by proxy, they're nonprofits. But the University of California Press, if I get these details, right, is that and I don't now because it's been a long time ago, now remember the years but essentially, the IRS came to them and said, we don't think you are a nonprofit, you're operating under the umbrella of the university, but we don't think you should be we think you should be operating independently. And, and not as a nonprofit. And so they did, they pulled out the structural organization of the University of California Press, and for some period of time, operated independently, at which point whoever was operating it, and I don't know for sure whether they went back to the IRS or the IRS came back to them. But they ended up going back to being structured as a nonprofit.

Jennifer Yoffy  17:56

It's not sustainable otherwise.  Because it's not sustainable, cynically, right? So it's, you know, it, it does make a lot of sense. But I'm sorry, I didn't really answer your question, which is how much of my time do I spend fundraising, which is, which is a lot. Do you find that most of your funders are, you know, the people that are interested in supporting the projects are they more interested in it because of the library donation aspect or supporting artists?

David Chickey  18:27

It varies, I mean, donors have different priorities. Foundations have different priorities in terms of what their identities are, and what they want to be tied to. I always thought, from the beginning that this mission of schools and libraries, specifically rural libraries, urban libraries, underserved libraries, would be a compelling reason for people to want to support what we do. And in truth, from the beginning, it's generally been a bit more straightforward to get people excited about the projects themselves. They love that work, or they love the idea of that work being shared. Or they're intrigued by the ideas and the concepts of what the artists are working on. To give money towards something more abstracted, like donating books to these institutions has always been harder to fundraise for.

Jennifer Yoffy  19:33

And so you see, we spend a lot of time and then the artists benefit because they are not having to do their own fundraising or bring their own finances to the table.

David Chickey  19:46

They're involved. I mean, we you know, it's it's it's definitely a group effort for every single project we do. And I wish that there was more of a standard roadmap. Let me say okay, well, for these 20 books, we're going to do this and it's going to work for all 20 of them. What works for one may not work for another? I feel like we kind of recreate the wheel every single time we go through this, you know, it can it can happen, in some cases really quickly and easily. And in other cases, it's really difficult. I wish I could tell you that when we begin every project, how that's gonna go, but I can't it's you know, it's, you just have to, to work through it.

Jennifer Yoffy  20:32

Do you modify the design at all based on how much money you think you can... I mean, Radius makes... they're all gorgeous books, but they're large and a lot of pages. I mean, thinking back to Meghann Riepenhoff's first book. That was massive!

David Chickey  20:50

I think saying, one of the things is that I from the beginning, when I'm meeting with an artist, and we're talking about the project, it's it's this, it's this idea that our mission is really to, to, to create a platform that is about their vision, right? What is the book they envision? Not? Not, not the book we envision, but what is it? What is it that they think is going to find the best platform for their work? And, and that does mean, sometimes when you're dealing with complicated bodies of work, or with, you know, that we want to go as far as we can, yeah, take advantage of the book form as much as possible. What can a book do? I mean, if, if, if we're like an art museum, or, and we're traveling version of one, you know, we can't do what's what's so amazing about museums and institutions, it's not the real physical work, it doesn't have that scale, we can't include video and audio, and all these incredible things that happen in museums now. But books can do things that exhibitions can't. And, you know, they are these incredibly intimate, generally speaking, one on one amazing things, and they have legs, they can go all over the world and reach  hopefully, you know, much more people than then what a, you know, what a what a brick and mortar building can do, right? So that's where we start. And so it does mean that some of the books that we do get get complicated or elaborate or, you know, and those are the kinds of things that, that, as a publisher, as an organization, we really try not to compromise on, if we can.  Now, we're very well versed at working within budgets. And we have to all the time, every day. But, you know, I tend to say when I'm meeting with an artist, and we're starting the conversation, that the things that I don't want to compromise are division of the project, the paper that we print on, the quality of the printing, the quality of the binding, just just making a really great object. But we can compromise on things like how, how big is the book? You know, if if an artist comes to us, and they really wanted 80 images in a book, but budget wise, we can only include 60, but keep the paper and keep the binding and keep to everything else, that feels like a difficult, but worthy compromise. And we also made print fewer copies at the end of the day, because we're not for profit, we don't exist on the money from the sale of the book in any way. So if we make enough copies of the book that goes to the donor, you know, we published a book not very long ago, a few years ago, and it sold out really quickly and it sparked this conversation among my, my board members about what is a success for us as publishers with a book? And with a for profit publisher a success is a book that goes into a second and a third and a fourth, you know, Harry Potter like printing, right? Just keep going and going and sell as many copies as possible. That is a success. And with us, that's where you can kind of turn that model on its head because, okay, let's say we sell, if we if we make enough copies of the book, to go to the donation program to fulfill our obligations to those schools and into those libraries and it goes out to the artist and it goes out to enough people to give the artist because I think that's also part of our mission. It's also books that go out to an audience of people that care about it is part of that mission. It's getting their work out there in the world. But if it goes out and sells out relatively quickly, that that is a version of success for us because we don't have to go through the orchestration of printing it again. Very often I'd rather have a conversation with an artist about what their next project is, and use the resources and the money on that, then to have more copies of the book that we worked on.

Jennifer Yoffy  25:10

Well especially if you think about the, the library side of things, I mean, you're taking time and resources away from a new project you could be doing and giving them more books, you know, to reprint the same one that they already have. That's interesting.  Um, I was just gonna shift gears a little bit, I know that Radius is committed to a balanced catalogue. And I've always really, personally appreciated the large number of female artists that you publish. And I was curious of the commitment to balance extended to other areas like race and established versus not establish, and different artistic mediums like, you know, where are you trying to create a balanced catalog? In what areas?

David Chickey  26:05

Yeah, those things don't happen unless you are conscious of them and focus on them.

Jennifer Yoffy  26:09

Yeah, absolutely.

David Chickey  26:10

From from the beginning. I was very conscious that, and it's still, even though I mean, this is going back 14, 15, 16 years ago, feeling very much at that time that the art world was way too white male dominated. I remember giving a talk two or three years into Radius and talking about this idea of what diversity meant, or what it meant to get away from that basic concept. Not that there aren't, you know, incredible and amazing white male artists, it's just that we need to be thinking of how do you stem that? How do you how do you break that cycle? And, and one of the, one of the people in the audience for that talk that I was giving had a catalog of a really great publisher happened to have it in their bag, and they had pulled it out and there were 60 books in their catalog. And one was with a woman.

Jennifer Yoffy  27:12

Whoa, that's insane.

David Chickey  27:13

And that was it. I mean, yeah, that was the diversity. And, and so very much from the beginning, we were trying to publish equal amounts of men and women at the very least, and in the beginning, that could be I remember having board meetings, sitting and talking and having presentations of people who had submitted projects to us. And there was a vast minority of people who were more diverse. Women who are of different races, who are from different, you know, places, even in the world, and having to try to make decisions and focus on that as a priority and yet, try to build that. Because if you're not consciously trying to build an advocate for those people, to either come to you, or you're searching for them, or you're doing whatever, then it doesn't happen. So I think, you know, at some point, around four or five years into Radius it sort of started, I noticed the shift. And then we were getting so many more proposals from women.

Jennifer Yoffy  28:16

That's wonderful.

David Chickey  28:16

And we were publishing more women. And it was really starting to make a dynamic difference in terms of how we go about. Now at this stage for Radius, it's about how does that go even deeper and farther and broader, we have not published as big a diversity, a racial diversity and ethnic diversity of artists as I want us to. And we're making greater strides in that, but it's the same kind of direct efforts. And, and it takes time. You have to search for them. I've started an initiative in the last three or four years of trying to build specifically endowments for specific kinds of books, books that deal with social justice, or racial issues or specific kinds of things. So that then not only are we ready funded for those books, but then we can proactively go out and find the projects as opposed to having any kind of reliance on those projects coming to us because I don't think they happen if you're not looking for them and trying for them and, and sort of figuring out ways to make it happen.

Jennifer Yoffy  29:29

Yeah, I agree with that. Do most of your projects come from submissions?

David Chickey  29:34

They used to, that's changing. You know, it wasn't it wasn't really just submissions, but it was, it was that sort of link of you would do a project with one artist who would recommend to another artist that they knew or to a curator, or it was this organic sort of linkage that was happening, which is beautiful in a way. I think one of the amazing things about Radius is it's felt very much at times, like we've been building this family, this this really extended group of people who are really divergent in terms of their practice, because we don't just publish photography. We've always wanted - my background was an art and and as I think you and a lot of people listening will know that Darius Himes, who's now at Christie's was hugely, his background was in photography. And even though I, I studied at Sussex University in the history of photography, and I knew a lot of photography, I think that, that in the very beginning was very much, you know, that sort of identity between the two of us. And I was never going to let go of this idea that as an art book publisher, you should be publishing what is photography as art, just like every other kind of art. It's not a ghettoized thing. It's just a part of what you do, right? And the reality is that, that that's not that true in the publishing world now. You don't find many art book publishers that publish photography and art of other media, they mostly do one or the other. And so I find that a little odd, but that's also taken effort, but this concept of this family is that then it brings all of these different kinds of people from different kinds of worlds together. But it also leads to, you know, we've now published 180 titles

Jennifer Yoffy  31:23

Wow..., thats so great.

David Chickey  31:24

It's kind of surprising when I say it sometimes, but we've published work with really incredible people. And most of the people that we publish with not all, but most of them are living artists. And once you've built that relationship, and you've worked 2, 3, 4 years to do a project with them, when they come back to you, and two or three more years, and they want to do another project and they do incredible work, then you want to be able to accommodate that. But the math, the math starts to not work. So that's part of where we are to is understanding like, you know, that natural kind of, you know, and maybe to the point of diversity, the problem with that scenario is that it stays too insular. You're not breaking out of the network, the bubble of whatever analogy you want to use of, of the people that you know, if you do that. So, you know, yes, it's important to continue those relationships. And yes, I, you know, we have published multiple titles with similar artists, but and we will continue to do that too. But it's important to be conscious of what that means.

Jennifer Yoffy  32:40

Yeah. To be intentional, to make sure that you're bringing in new people, and kind of diversifying as well.

David Chickey  32:48

Yeah, across Radius in terms of our staff, in terms of our board, in terms of the people we publish all of that. It's endemic to every part of the organization.

Jennifer Yoffy  32:59

Of all the photo books that you've worked on with Radius, can you tell us about a couple of your favorite experiences? And what made them so meaningful to you?

David Chickey  33:10

The impossible question to answer.

Jennifer Yoffy  33:14

Who is your favorite? (laughs)

David Chickey  33:16

Yeah, exactly, who is my favorite? It's interesting. I do get asked that question a lot. I'm fascinated by.... I don't... And I really do honestly, believe I don't really have favorites. I think our job as a publisher is really to channel the work in a way to figure out a way to find its own kind of voice. And as a designer, I've never been very... I've never taken a lot of ownership of my work, because I think it is so collaborative, and it is so you know, I think the books are only as good as the work we publish.

Jennifer Yoffy  33:58

Yeah, you're not a magician.

David Chickey  34:01

Yeah, we're not. You know, some of the books that we've done that, I think for me personally, that are a little different, maybe in their origin or the way that they happened. I don't know if you saw a book that we published a few years ago that's on a collection of black dolls. It's a private collection of a woman named Deborah Neff, who came to us and said she had been collecting these pieces for 30 years and a couple of museums that were interested in, in, in showing the work and thinking about publication at the same time. And so this falls a little outside of the realm of the kind of thing that we typically publish. But it is this this personal collection, these are mostly dolls that were made in the late 19th and early 20th century, mostly by slaves, mostly for the white children that were in their charge.

Jennifer Yoffy  34:57

Ohhh, that's interesting

David Chickey  34:58

And they are typically they're made with all kinds of found materials, but they're made with black cloth and as objects just in terms of from a ethnographic and art historical sort of perspective. They're amazing. I mean, they're just these incredible things in and of themselves. In addition, she had started collecting photography of the era, because she was very interested in what people, how people held and thought and and, you know, lived with these objects. So she had found mostly she was looking for photographs of children with these dolls although she found a lot of photographs of adults as well. So there's, there's a whole collection of photography, and you find a lot of a lot of these white children, mostly girls, but a lot of these white children holding these black dolls in photographs at a time when photography was such a, a moment of, of what you included in a photograph, if a photograph was taken of you was more important then than it is now.

Jennifer Yoffy  36:06

Yeah, so much precious. Yeah.

David Chickey  36:09

So you know, really interesting this choice, or sometimes photographs of, of white children that would have a collection of white dolls with these other black dolls included in them. And then certainly photographs of white children holding white dolls. And then a few not as not as often, but photographs of black children holding white dolls. But at the time that we published the book, she had never been able to find a photograph of a black child holding a black doll. And that simple lack of imagery just says so much about the endemic racism in our country and about ideas of identity and about, you know, it just was such a powerful concept to me. And the book, like I said, the book fell outside the realm of the kinds of things that we typically published, and I presented it to the board and to my publications committee, didn't have really great images to share with them and they rejected the project. Not because it wasn't a project with merit, but because we had a lot of other great projects to review. And I just couldn't let it go. And two or three days later, went back to my board and wrote, sort of the first time that I had done this, a sort of impassioned letter to my board and said we have to publish this. And we did, and they were incredibly supportive. And at the time that we released that book, and you know, within a few months, it had sold more copies of any book we had ever published.

Jennifer Yoffy  37:38

Wow, really?

David Chickey  37:39

Yeah. And really did resonate really strongly, obviously, with the donation program. So I don't know, I think that comes to mind just because it took something different.

Jennifer Yoffy  37:56

Did you have to get the dolls photographed?

David Chickey  38:00

We did.

Jennifer Yoffy  38:03

There's lot of additional considerations and decisions to make too. You know, how to photograph them and...

David Chickey  38:11

How to photograph them, which ones to include of the collection? A project like that, I think took us three years to do. Some of these projects are really more time consuming than others.

Jennifer Yoffy  38:27

How long does the project typically take on average?

David Chickey  38:32

Depends on the type of project, a lot of the projects can be accomplished within a year of us committing to them, but usually, those projects, you know, are very far advanced, by the time we start the process of working with them, and then taking them from then to the final publication in a year. That's about as fast as we could ever do a project. It's more typical that a project takes a year and a half to two, you know, to really come to fruition. And then some projects we published a Sol LeWitt book last year, that took us five years of research and the work to do with it. We're going on press in just a few weeks with an Agnes Martin project. And that project, really the germ of that project started eight years ago. And so it took a really long time for that project to really come to fruition. And then once we really had a strong sense of exactly where the book was going, we commissioned quite a bit of text and it took a lot of research and it took a lot of re photography of some of the pieces and so you know, it depends on on the project, but they can take a while.

Jennifer Yoffy  39:44

Do you typically go on press?

David Chickey  39:46

I do. If I can. You know, I'm I actually, well I love the process of printing books. It's it's unbelievable as you well know. I mean, it's purely mechanical, which is insane that we got this process to make these objects in this way. You know, it's like having, like a giant, you know, bus that that paper runs into an ink over rollers and comes out the other end. And it's such a it's such an art and hopefully not a disappearing one.  And, you know, that that I I'm like a kid just completely fascinated by and love that process. But I also love being there with artists. You know, I, I've heard other designers make comments about not wanting the artist involved or you know, whatever. I'd love that process. I love that give and take I love the collaboration, I'd love the whole. And I think as an artist to be able to see your work come off an offset print while you're alive is just it's such a gift. It's such a cool and fascinating thing.

Jennifer Yoffy  40:24

Truly. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So you've seen the publishing industry change a lot during your time working with it? What changes have you seen for the better? And what have you seen, from your perspective, from the worse?

David Chickey  41:21

I think, definitely for the better at this moment, I feel like the publishing world as a whole is at a place where there's such an explosion of expression, you know, exploration of what books can do, ways in which people can find ways to get whatever it is they want to put in a book form and get it out into the world. I just had a conversation maybe a month ago now with Clément Chéroux, who's the new curator of photography at MoMA. He was at SFMOMA before and he's moved to MOMA. And he was asked by Aperture to be, I think, a guest editor for the publication that they do for Perry photo. And, and he started doing research on photo book publishers specifically, and looking at, you know, how when did this sort of like explosion of photo book publishing happen? How did this happen? Right? How far back does it go? And I don't remember the exact numbers, but the explosion of numbers of publishers from 20 years ago to 10 years ago to five years ago, two years ago, is astounding. I mean, there are so many, you know, I I still in my brain think of Radius as this, you know, young, independent upstart of a publisher...

Jennifer Yoffy  42:49

Yeah, okay, grandpa.

David Chickey  42:50

Yeah, exactly. At this point, you know, we're like, becoming old guard.

Jennifer Yoffy  42:57

I know, I know.

David Chickey  43:00

Because they're just really, really cool things happening. And I think one of the things that's happened in that process is that the concept of self publishing, which, when I started, you know, publishing, designing books, for publishers, that was like a dirty word, you just, you just didn't say self publishing, right? It is so not anymore. And I think that's awesome, you know. So yeah, I mean, I think for the most part, it's been really positive. What's happened? The trick for me is what the risk of the negative I suppose for me is that I'm curious about watching what's happening as technology changes. And as we were just talking about how much we love this idea of offset printing, digital printing is getting better and better. And it is, and more and more things are possible by digital printing. What happens? I mean, I don't know. I mean, maybe it'll all be for the better in terms of getting objects out in the world, which at the end of the day, ink on paper, however, the ink gets on the paper, if it can find a way of changing lives and doing better things, then I'm all for it, but I don't know.

Jennifer Yoffy  44:14

Yeah, I mean, the digital is great, because you can print 50 copies, and then when those run out, you can print 50 More, as opposed to offset where you kind of have to commit upfront, you know, like for me to do another printing of a book that sold out. I mean, it's starting all over in terms financially.

David Chickey  44:35

Exactly.

Jennifer Yoffy  44:36

And so that's a big consideration. It's like, okay, we only let's say we did a run of 500 and they sold out. Do we know that there are 500 more people that want this book or have we saturated the market and we're just going to be out, you know, a significant amount of money printing another run?

David Chickey  44:57

I think one of the most difficult jobs as a publisher is knowing how many copies to print?

Jennifer Yoffy  45:02

It keeps me up at night.

David Chickey  45:05

Yeah, me too. Every every book, you know, you go back and forth and back and forth. And sometimes you get it, you know, just right. And sometimes you just don't. You just think, Oh, I could have I should have printed way more copies of that. Or, you know, on the other side of it, which these days is pretty rare because we didn't usually have the budget to print a huge number of books any day. But, but But yeah, occasionally, you know, in the past, I'd look back and think I shouldn't have printed that many books.

Jennifer Yoffy  45:36

How would you describe your book design philosophy? And do you design all of the books for Radius?

David Chickey  45:45

Not literally all of them, but most of them. We sometimes work with outside designers, I'm always really open to that, if the artist wants has a long, for example, has a long working relationship with another designer, absolutely, I would be foolish not to want to work with them in whatever way. We love to be involved, we love to be part of that process to whatever, you know, can happen. And sometimes, you know, some of the artists that we work with are really amazing and visionary designers in their own right. And so, you know, as a designer, I'm not doing much. I'm supporting.

Jennifer Yoffy  46:26

You're giving it a thumbs up?

David Chickey  46:27

Yes, exactly. Wow, that's amazing. But, but yes, in general, you know, I design all the books, we have a team here, we work really closely. I mean, we just this morning, we're looking at the typography of one of the books that we're working on, and we printed eight different options of different typography. And we've been obsessing over it, and we, we all talk about it. So it's, it's not like, you know, there's nothing dictatorial about anything that we do. And the same, I think that's, that is, at the very end of the day, my design philosophy, I think it's is very much, I call it listening to the work. And sometimes I'm worried that sounds like I lived in Santa Fe too long. But I think inside that idea, there's something about really trying to get into the core of the work to understand it, and to think about, okay, so if you're an artist that works in this way, and makes this kind of work, or takes these kinds of images, or you know, fabricates these kinds of three dimensional objects, or makes these kinds of videos, then how do you then think about what that translates into a book form? So it's taking the inspiration of the work itself and trying to find a form. I think the thing that we offer is that we live in this world of paper and binding and books and know what's possible, what's not possible, what's, you know, what's been done, what hasn't been done, you know? And that's maybe a repository of information that can help with an artist to try to figure out how how their work can fit into that and, and maybe explode some of those boundaries. I was not formally trained as a graphic designer, my degrees are in art history and painting. And I gave a talk at Harvard, to their MFA candidates one time, and I was, you know, felt so out of..., not qualified to be doing this. And, but I think that sometimes is a gift because I did it because I was passionate about it, because I loved it, because I wanted to do it not because I had trained background. And so that, you know, to whatever degree it can, it can sort of help you to sort of let go of the, of the structure and just really try to, I think that can be helpful.

Jennifer Yoffy  49:13

And so the last question, we touched on this a little bit, but what kind of photography books would you like to see more of out in the world?

David Chickey  49:22

More divergent voices. Bottom line. I mean, so many, so many great photography books being made right now. I'm not sure that it's a lack of great books. But I still think that as much as our world is shifting, and we're and we're changing, and we're making sure that things like this are happening. It's still, we still need more.

Jennifer Yoffy  49:47

Agreed. Do you feel like or I should say, I feel like with COVID coincidentally, I guess a lot of the portfolio reviews have gone online. And, you know, so the ones that I've done, I've seen a lot of really diverse work, you know, people from all over the world, which is not typical. So the way that occasionally I find artists is from an in person portfolio review, but it's tends to be people that are relatively local, or at least, you know, based in the States. And so, I've been able to pick up some projects in the past year or so from, you know, an artist that lives in Poland that would not have been able to, to come in person to show me the work. So that's been really interesting.

David Chickey  50:37

That's the gift of our, of one of the things that's happened in the last year and a half, right, is that we found ways to be connected. And, and work through those connections, in kind of amazing ways, right. So that, you know, I know, even for the, for the Zoom talks and lectures that we've done with artists, you know, it was, it was this sort of knee kerk, kind of, we're going to try to replace what used to be in person talks and book signings, it wasn't, wasn't born out of this idea that that by doing so, we could reach a much bigger audience than we could the other way and a much more, a much, you know, you know, at a single time, a much more divergent arty audience. And that's that you will never go back from that. Right? That that feels, you know, even better. I mean, I think farther to that, then you try to figure out how do you get beyond that too, because then that's only limited to the people who have the technology who can actually be there, right? So how do you how do you break even farther? I don't know. But I mean, I think this whole idea of, of, we're moving in a really good direction. And yet, there's a whole lot more.

Jennifer Yoffy  52:00

Well even like collaborating design wise, with artists. I mean, I've always done it virtually, you know, for the most part, or we're sending things back and forth in the mail. My artists, budgets don't typically allow for them to come luxuriate in Atlanta for long periods of time. But a lot of designers, you know, I collaborate with Hans Gremmen on a couple of titles. And the first one that we did, it was kind of mandatory that the artists come over on that they work in person, you know, in the Netherlands together. And then this time, I mean, it wasn't possible with COVID. And, again, it's just kind of expands people's concept of how to do things, you know, and that it's been able to be equally as collaborative, virtually.

David Chickey  52:49

We're launching a couple of books in a couple of weeks in Paris. And it will be the first time that I've met the artists in person.

Jennifer Yoffy  52:58

Yeah, yeah.

David Chickey  53:00

That's so strange. But yeah, it is. I'm not sure it's ideal, but it is possible. And it's, and it feels like so much more is possible as we become more adjusted to these kind of things.

Jennifer Yoffy  53:13

Yeah. One of these days, I'm going to come to the big party, the big Radius party,

David Chickey  53:19

Please do!

Jennifer Yoffy  53:23

What time of year?

David Chickey  53:24

We do it every other year. So we don't do it every year. It's such a, it's such a big thing for us to pull off as a small team. So we only do it every other year. And we do it in the..., this time it was in late August, which is a good time in Santa Fe. It's moved around a little bit. It was in early October, one time. It used to be in September, but September proved to be a month that so many other things were happening that it was complicated logistically, and so I think we'll probably stay in the mid to late August realm.

Jennifer Yoffy  54:02

So that would be 2023?

David Chickey  54:05

 That's right.

Jennifer Yoffy  54:06

All right. I'll block off...

David Chickey  54:09

Yeah. Yeah, block off August (laughs) 2023

Jennifer Yoffy  54:12

Yeah, yeah. On it! (laughs) I really appreciate you doing this today. This was so great.

David Chickey  54:18

It was really fun. Nice to talk to you.

Jennifer Yoffy  54:20

Thank you for listening to the Perfect Bound podcast. If you'd like to hear any past episodes, you can find them at the Yoffy Press website YoffyPress.com/podcasts. You can also find this on any other podcast streaming platform that you might use, like Spotify or Apple podcasts. If you feel like rating it with lots of positive stars. I would really appreciate that too. And I'm looking forward to seeing you next time. Thank you