Magazine for KU Department of English, Graduate Programs in Creative Writing by Daniel Rolf

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CLIENT

University of Kansas Department of English, Graduate Programs in Creative Writing is a three-year program with tracks in fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction. By the time they graduate, students will have produced a book-length manuscript of poetry or prose.

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BRIEF

At the most essential level we wanted to create a very nice object to hold the great work we would be publishing. The next goal was that Issue One, being our inaugural issue, needed to set the tone for Beecher’s as an ongoing project.

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APPROACH

This limited edition print run inaugurates Beecher’s magazine. Rather than adorning the new magazine in shiny colorful clothes, Beecher's One was designed to give the text primacy, and record the reader’s tactile interaction with the physical magazine. The physical object, with a naked spine and a rigid, toothy, absorbent paper, is meant to show evidence of the reader by absorbing and visibly recording the reading experience: fingerprints on the page, the bending of pages, and the weakening of the unprotected spine.

PRODUCTION LESSONSThe biggest challenge was finding a bindery that could produce our desired custom binding. Though a zine maker might know exactly what we were trying to create, the commercial bindery we employed had never done anything like it (and they weren’t sure why we were). Obviously, there was some trial and error, and a lot of back and forth, but it was interesting to bridge ideas born in handmade book production and commercial binding.