2016Catalogue6.5X9.5.Indd 1 15-10-02 3:49 PM
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2016catalogue6.5x9.5.indd 1 15-10-02 3:49 PM New for 2016 5 International Backlist 51 BDANG Imprint 57 Backlist Comics 63 Backlist Fiction 81 Checklist 92 Ordering info 96 Conundrum Press acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for theArts and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund toward their publications. 2016catalogue6.5x9.5.indd 2 15-10-02 3:49 PM THE TWENTY YEAR CONUNDRUM... The concept for Conundrum Press was born in a shack somewhere in north- ern BC, buried in a conversation about the end of my treeplanting career. It was summer 1995 and I had just finished an MA in English from Concordia University, travelled the world, done seven tours of duty in the bush to pay for it all, and was pondering my next move. “It’s a real conundrum,” I said. The planter across the table from me lost his soup. He had never heard the word “conundrum” before and thought it was hilarious. Later, when I was living back in post-referendum Mile End Montreal paying barely anything in rent, looking to write and make chapbooks for my friends, the word came up again. In the spring of 1996 I hosted a launch at a loft for a handmade book and cassette by a remarkable writer and performer who also happened to be my roommate. everything I know about love I learned from taxidermy by Catherine Kidd was laborious to make, with each Japanese paper spine (cover- ing the staples) fed trough my shiny new desktop printer, each cover sprayed with varnish so the ink didn’t run, each page cut with a knife. It was so much work making these books that I felt I had to give it a name. I thought of the conversation I had planting. Conundrum Press was born. Today Conundrum Press has moved to rural Nova Scotia and has developed a reputation and an international reach. This is in large part due to the rise of the literary graphic novel, many examples of which can be found here. This catalogue gives the complete bibliography of all the books Conundrum has published, from the tiniest chapbook to the international hardcover, from the comics and zine collections, to spoken word, short fiction, and novels. It’s all here. It’s all good. And we are celebrating our twentieth year with the re- lease in May of 20x20, an anthology of twenty Conundrum artists, one for each year. A veritable cornucopia of goodness. The talent represented on these pages are a group of diverse, creative, hard working, wonderful people. I couldn’t have made it this far without them. — Andy Brown, Greenwich, NS 3 2016catalogue6.5x9.5.indd 3 15-10-02 3:49 PM 4 2016catalogue6.5x9.5.indd 4 15-10-02 3:49 PM NEW FOR 2016 from 20x20 by Billy Mavreas 2016catalogue6.5x9.5.indd 5 15-10-02 3:49 PM 20X20: TWENTY YEARS OF CONUNDRUM PRESS Edited by Andy Brown onundrum Press was created in 1996 in Anthology Cpost-referendum Montreal by Andy Brown, ISBN 978-1-77262-002-3 to give voice to the under-represented work- 7.5x10 inches, 220 pages, softcover, flaps ing in the underground anglo cultural milieu. full colour, $20 Writers and cartoonists came to him wanting to make chapbooks. Soon he started making genre- May 2016 defying books with spines, not staples. After fif- teen years he moved to Nova Scotia and focused exclusively on graphic novels. Now, twenty years later, this anthology represents all that history, all that talent, all that goodness. To celebrate twenty years in operation he asked one author or artist for each year of the press who had a book out that year to contribute Andy Brown is the founder of Conundrum Press and the author of I can see you being invisible (DC Books) and something new, something that represented The Mole Chronicles (Insomniac Press). Conundrum. For some it would have been the He lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. first book he or she had ever made. So in the end twenty Conundrumites represent twenty years, hence 20x20. There will be digging deep into the archives, there will be memoirs, there will be comics, drawings, and photographs. There will be laughter and tears of joy. Facing page: Conundrum Towers through the years 6 2016catalogue6.5x9.5.indd 6 15-10-02 3:49 PM 1996: Catherine Kidd 1997: Billy Mavreas 1998: Dana Bath 1999: Howard Chackowicz 2000: Lance Blomgren 2001: Andy Brown 2002: Corey Frost 2003: Marc Tessier 2004: Shary Boyle 2005: Maya Merrick 2006: Jillian Tamaki (cover) 2007: Emily Holton 2008: JR Carpenter 2009: Ian Sullivan Cant 2010: Elisabeth Belliveau 2011: Philippe Girard 2012: Joe Ollmann 2013: Dakota McFadzean 2014: Meags Fitzgerald 2015: Sherwin Tjia 2016: David Collier Plus endpapers by Temple Bates 7 2016catalogue6.5x9.5.indd 7 15-10-02 3:49 PM David Collier It was almost time for me to go home to Montreal Mile End taking author photos on swingsets in a light when I realized what the book really was: linked stories, snow, and then he printed them as stamps for the not a novel. I eliminated all but five of the stories and envelopes. We organized some evening assembly-line reduced the manuscript from over 200 pages to about parties at Andy’s apartment, tricky combinations of a hundred. Andy seemed excited about the possibili- glue sticks, Exacto knives, friends, and beer. We made ties this opened up for the book as an object, and one around 100 copies, and each fragile, awkward exemplar evening he had a thunderbolt moment: each story felt precious. The edges of the cardboard cover started would be a poster, or rather, a poster-sized architec- fraying the moment you opened the book for the first tural blueprint. They would be folded and inserted time, and the envelopes holding the blueprints jiggled into envelopes, which would then be bound by a paper warningly as you pulled the posters out and tucked cover. The book would be collated by hand, making it them back in. The posters themselves were clumsy as much a work of art as of literature. I called the collec- to read, but so pretty, with their blue ink and Andy’s tion What Might Have Been Rain. line-drawing illustrations. Everyone who saw it said, After I returned to Montreal in the fall of 1997, “Oh, can I please buy one right now?” The book was we got to work. The production of the book took a an object of instant desire, and, without great attention year. Andy had the final edits of the stories printed at a and care, it would come completely apart over time. blueprinting firm, and had cardboard covers produced. We spent a memorable winter afternoon wandering — Dana Bath from 1998 8 2016catalogue6.5x9.5.indd 8 15-10-02 3:49 PM We’re chatting in the kitchen of “Conundrum Towers the late 90s, post-referendum. But at the time I wasn’t Estate,” a term Brown coins in his ironic introduction so much self-consciously doing that, I was just kind of to The Portable Conundrum, referring to the press’s doing what I was doing. At one point I realized that I headquarters. Located in the apartment downstairs was part of this community, mostly the spoken word from his St-Dominique Street residence, his office area community,” he recalls. “As more and more people be- is comfortable, yet considerably less luxurious than came invested in me doing (this), I had to start thinking, what’s described in the book. As one might expect, Okay, this is not just a hobby. I’m providing a service. money isn’t the motivating factor when it comes to I’m part of a community, and maybe I should give it a running a small English-language press in Montreal. name.” Asked what inspired him to get into the business, Brown reminisces about how a side project quickly —from the Montreal Review of Books on the grew into something more formal. “At the beginning, occasion of the 10 year anniversary of it was very much a Montreal thing, and I was filling Conundrum Press what I perceived as a gap in Anglophone culture in 9 2016catalogue6.5x9.5.indd 9 15-10-02 3:50 PM Posters by Billy Mavreas Shary Boyle Nathaniel Moore at Indigo launch of Bowlbrawl 10 2016catalogue6.5x9.5.indd 10 15-10-02 3:50 PM Elisabeth Belliveau 11 2016catalogue6.5x9.5.indd 11 15-10-02 3:50 PM Mini zines by J.R. Carpenter 12 2016catalogue6.5x9.5.indd 12 15-10-02 3:50 PM I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar (that much is true) and, as my sister Nika joked, filling my agendas with entries like “Work. Drink. Drink. Work. Drink. Drink. Work.” What she didn’t know, what no one knew, was that I was also writing a book – feverishly, in the shell-blue light of early morning, gripped by a strange insomnia I shared with my anti-heroine, Cassy Peerson. Cassy and I shared other things – I was living in a two-and-a-half, the dimensions of which more or less directly inspired the car Cassy found herself living in, and I was dating a strapping young tattoo artist, who more or less directly inspired Cassy’s love at the time. But I had something Cassy didn’t have – corpo- Maya Merrick at the Copacabana, circa 2005 reality, and the associated business of making money an actual body seems to require.