Q: What you like about your bookcases?

A: I like the bookshelves at Conveyor Arts’ studio because we built them ourselves; we made sketches, went to the local lumberyard and found a beautiful tone of oak. We used a saw, hammer, nails, and some friends (coaxed by some beer and pizza) to put them together.

Q: Are they everything you every wanted or is there room for improvement?

A: The only thing that is missing is a rolling ladder– think Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face! Next time, we’ll definitely work a rolling ladder into the design. The shelves are over eight feet tall, so it’s tough to get to the top!

The other design element we struggle with is how to store and display the incredible amount of zines, newspapers, and other forms ofphotobooks that don’t sit on a shelf like traditional books do.

Q: How you organize your photobooks?

A: Most often you’ll find piles and piles of books on our library table, when artists come out to discuss their book projects, we tend pull everything off the shelves and then randomly put everything back on the shelves. It’s a constant cycle. The organization depends on who is putting them away on that particular day.

We daydream of hiring a librarian, creating a cataloguing system, and little brass nameplates for each shelf by year, or artist, or theme, or anything, really.

Q: What was the first photobook you ever bought, and why did it catch your attention?

A: The first book we bought for Conveyor Arts was Alec Soth’s From Here to There, published in conjunction with his retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. We’d just seen the exhibition and attended a talk at The Strand bookstore in Manhattan.

There are so many special design elements, the four-color cover stamp, the alternating paper stocks, the printed endpapers, the pocket on the last page with a special extra book inside! We bought it because we love the work, but it’s also a great tool to show clients at Conveyor Arts, it pretty much outlines all the really specialty elements you can apply to your book project.

I also love the process and design inspiration found on the Walker Art Center’s Gradient blog:

Q: Have your shelves ever collapsed under the weight?

A: Never. We built them strong!

Q: Or have you had any other type of studio disaster caused by photobooks?

A: Nothing too disastrous, we mostly just tend to lose things in the stacks of books, phone, keys, etc. In the moment, after a long day of studio and missing keys, that can feel disastrous. The books have really overtaken the studio, which makes sense I guess, since we are bookmakers!

Q: What was the last photobook you purchased?

A: See the Light: Photography, Perception, Cognition: The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection. It contextualizes the advent of photography alongside the industrial revolution and advances in psychology. It includes some of our favorites photographers like Edward Weston, Harry Callahan, Minor White, Bernice Abbott, among others. Highly recommended! 

Q: What is the next photobook you plan to purchase?

A: Tales from the City of Gold by Jason Larkin. One of our editors, Liz Sales, just wrote a beautiful piece for the upcoming Alchemy Issue of Conveyor Magazine on this project, the work is stunning and we got a sneak peek at his forthcoming book via the web. We can’t wait to have one in our library! 

Christina Labey and Jason Burstein are the founders of Conveyor Arts, a production house specializing in small run editions of artist books and editions, exhibition catalogues, zines, and other printed matter related to photography. Under the imprint Conveyor Editions, we commission and publish several projects annually that reimagine the form and function of the contemporary photobook. Facebook. Twitter: @conveyorarts. Instagram. pimp bookcase