As Vamp & Tramp, Booksellers, LLC, Vicky and I represent the work of 150+ contemporary fine presses and book artists. For simplicity's sake, we're going to use the term book artist for everyone, even though we know how inadequate and even insulting that broad brush can be. As we travel the country taking that work to institutional and private customers, we often talk with groups of book artists about the commercial side of things. We've been asked to write about the issues we cover about the commercial side of creating contemporary fine press and artists' books.

 

We'll try to keep this a practical tale. Not exactly a How to Sell Your Book Works article, because frankly we don’t know the answer to that. What we can offer is only How We Try to Sell/Place the Works We Choose to Represent.  Everything we say will be mired in the muddle and eddy of particular circumstances and limited to our experience.

 

And you should know up front that that experience is limited. Ten years ago we didn't know what an artists' book was. Wondrous serendipity and Ron King's Antony and Cleopatra let in the light. But it's only 2 years ago that we closed our book and art gallery in Birmingham, Alabama, and took to road as fulltime circuit riders for book arts.

 

To give the article some kind of form, we'll look at three areas: how Vamp & Tramp operates; how we approach dealing with collections; and some general but no less personal guesses at why some works succeed with us and others do not.