I don’t know why, but a lot of people ask about newsprint…

If you want individual sheets look at French Paper Company, a great producer in Milwaukee, a family-owned business. We buy a lot of stock from these very good people. And they have a variety of newsprint style paper (and butcher paper). Great quality. They sell lettersize and other sizes, in text weight and cover weight. It’s easy to order online.

You can also talk to Borden & Riley Paper Co. , Phone: 718.454.9494; www.bordenandriley.com. I once went to this production plant to buy newsprint, they were at 184-10 Jamaica Ave. Hollis, NY 11423, not far from JFK, sort-of in Queens, I guess. They make newsprint but they sell it mostly in huge rolls, or in pads. I believed we used it for Stan App’s Soft Hands — for the fly-leaf. We chopped off the part where the pages were glued to the spine, and fed it to our laserprinter, adding an image of the moon-landing.

That’s just to say, it’s hard to buy newsprint these days. However…

We’ve printed many things on newsprint, using local printers who do circulars and newspapers. Consider Linco in Long Island City (www.lincoprinting.com). They printed all of New York Nights for us. They printed a chapbook for us, Micah Ballard’s Evangeline Downs. It’s a stapled chapbook, in the style of South American poetry pamphlets. They printed full-color on a thin glossy sheet for the cover, and b&w newsprint interiors. Very old-school.

Our 2011 catalog was printed two-color on newsprint by Expedi Printing (www.expedi.com) in Williamsburg/Bushwick. Go local! If you like you can contact Corky Lee, their Sales Rep, at 718 417-0900. They do a lot of newsprint projects for local artists. 3,000 is the minimum run, 11″ x 12.5″ tabloid is the minimum size and the turnaround is 5 business days! Expedi, no kidding!

Sometimes one of UDP’s editors will do what we call a “knock-off book” — something of their own perhaps, or a friend’s book — usually in a relatively small edition, 25, 50, maybe 200… The edition is too small to deal with it like a UDP chapbook so it’s not necessarily part of the subscription, or the official catalog of titles. These books don’t get promoted on the website or in our catalog. They aren’t sent to the distributors or anything like that. They may just be passed out at a reading, or sent to a random number of subscribers as a little extra gift, etc. “Knock-offs” don’t have to be planned into the schedule, so they can come about quite spontaneously. It’s possible James Hoff came up with the name “knock-off” for such personal projects around 2002. They aren’t meant to be limited-edition collector’s items, more often they’re cheap & dirty chapbooks produced with off-cut and extra paper at the Presse. One time Darin Klein in LA made a knock-off of a “knock-off” and called it a knock-off, so it is one. It was a book of spam messages, the shape and size were modeled on a “knock-off” called Add Nothing, written and printed by Anna Moschovakis and Matvei Yankelevich, using physical cut-ups from New Yorker arranged into New-Yorker-style quatrains. A more recent example of a knock-off title (2010) is The Nature Poetry of Matvei Yankelevich by Matvei Yankelevich.

A combination of the following, in no particular order:

1) the Full Presse Subscription
2) our Partner Bookstores — check out the list!
3) distribution for the full-length or non-chapbook titles, mostly through SPD, America’s only non-profit distribution company
4) some of our art-related books are distributed through DAP, and directly to art book stores like Printed Matter, Art Book @ PS1, the New Museum Bookstore, etc.
5) direct sales through our Web site (the best way to support our efforts)
6) book fairs, festivals, conferences, and readings
7) direct orders from independent bookstores
the usual internet suspects carry most of our books — Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc… But PLEASE don’t shop there!

The first time the name Ugly Duckling Presse appeared on a publication was 1995: a self-published chapbook of Matvei Yankelevich’s poems. He simply liked the German spelling because of a sentimental attachement to a “tamizdat” (Western) publication of Daniil Kharms’s work from the 1970s — a little book from K-Presse (Kafka Presse). At the very turn of the millenium, when UDP was forming into a loose affiliation of writers and artists of various stripes, the plan was to found an arts organization in which the book would hold a central but not exclusive place. Because the founders of Ugly Duckling Presse shared an interest in making books and periodicals — and exploring the the idea of what makes a book a Book — the word “press” seemed suitable. However, since nobody wanted to limit the project to traditional publishing, they decided to keep the extra “e” at the end of “Presse” because it could stand in for “everything else.” And the word was somehow more unfamiliar, a foreign intruder, holding the potential for “presentation” of various kinds — on the stage and the street, as well as the page. To publish, after all, means “to make public,” and to “present.” The “E” = extra, eclectic, eccentric…

You can see the history for details on this, but the main point has to do with not growing up to be a swan. In 1999 and 2000, the group of friends responsible for the emergence of UDP was at first interested in creating an all-welcoming Center for Junior Artists: an open space for making performance and books. But space for such ventures was becoming scarce in New York City and they decided simply stick with the name of Ugly Duckling (Matvei Yankelevich’s zine from 1993-1998 was called The Ugly Duckling and the imprint of Ugly Duckling Presse could be spotted in the fine print of the EMERGENCY Gazette (1999-2002, co-produced by Yankelevich and Yelena Gluzman under the guidance of the mysterious Bros. Lumiere). It seems the zine project was first given the name Ugly Duckling by Yankelevich’s college sweetheart and first collaborator, Tristra Newyear, who had noticed a used-car lot by that name near their school. UGLY = an intuitive aesthetic program based in xerox-art, zines, newsprint, paste-ups, general exaltation of the mess as a kind of antipode to beauty, and aversion to computers and gloss. (“Sho’ is ugly!”) The outsider motif in HCA’s story also appealed to the group, which was convinced that the outsider was always more interesting than the insider. For better or for worse, the name stuck.