Beyond the book
Books become artworks in the hands of Perimiter Editions co-founder Dan Rule.
Words by Cassandra Bulman
Photos by Cassandra Bulman and Dan Rule
“They’re sensitive little objects,” Dan Rule says as he shows me Steve Carr’s Variations for Troubled Hands. We’re talking about creating art books that fit the work – Dan and his partner Justine Ellis decided to publish the 256 photograph collection in paper back form, like a novel. This way, you can flip through the images and watch the story of the dancer’s arm move across the page.
Dan and Justine don’t just print artwork in book format – a lot of thought and care goes into the design, so the product of each project really reflects the work inside.
“It’s not necessarily artwork as such but it’s definitely about creating objects that extend the content,” Dan explains. “it’s different to that more traditional idea of the hardcover art book or coffee table book where it’s literally just this vessel to represent the work. Each book is really responding to the work and offering challenges to the work – some of the books are very non-traditional in their layouts. The form really speaks to the work.”
Steve Carr’s book is one of the 39 books that Perimeter Editions has published to date – Dan and Justine are hoping to have published another five by the end of 2018. They are not new to the world of art book publishing, and Perimeter Editions is not their first publishing venture.
“Going all the way back to 2001,” Dan says, “we started working on books with friends of ours as a kind of creative outlet. We were just finishing up university – I was freelance writing and coming from a background of art and photography theory, film theory and cultural theory and Justine was coming out of filmmaking and photography. We just got together with friends of ours who were coming out of graphic design and started making books as a fun thing to do.
“That very much percolated for really the next decade. We were each working in a free lance capacity – me as a writer chiefly with Fairfax and various magazines – but we kept making books,” he says.
“The first imprint we had was called And Collective. They were these very project-based books, getting these various contributors together to respond to a theme – that classic first book you make out of uni. They were really fun and we learnt about the basics of bookmaking and how to sell to stores. That eventually morphed into another small imprint called Erm Books which were these very specific little artist books with artists, illustrators and photographers.”
When they moved on to creating and publishing books through Perimeter Editions, Dan and Justine were also doing other work to support themselves – Perimeter was always a passion project.
“There was no sense that there would be any income from it or a job,” Dan says. “It’s challenging and a lot of work is done off-site, out of hours, but we often use the store for our meetings because we have endless reference material in that early search with an artist. It’s essentially this library that you can just reference.
“Small publishing in a contemporary setting is interesting because we’re often working across time zones – the artist might be in Australia and we might be here, but the designer might be in London or Switzerland.” But Perimeter is not just a publisher – it was originally a bookstore before Dan and Justine decided to expand the market, publishing and distributing books through Perimeter.
“Perimeter was founded in 2011 just as a bookstore and it was very much an extension of a creative project. It was more something we just wanted to do together,” Dan tells me. “We each had our own sources of income and I could man the store for most of the week being a freelancer. In the early days it was very quiet – it’s a very specialist thing that we’re doing. I could just be working away and there’s no pressure to make it into something that it wasn’t.”
The store started out very small, but slowly grew, and now Dan and Justine stock Perimeter Editions’ books alongside art books from all over the world. “We were engaging with the community in Europe, the US and Japan – we knew what was out there, but there was a particular generation of this kind of material that wasn’t being rep resented in Australia. In opening the store we were just opening a little window into what we knew was happening overseas and bringing in books that weren’t otherwise in stores.” “We chiefly publish Australian artists,”
Dan tells me, “for no other reason but it’s where we live, it’s our community. But we also publish plenty of international artists and that’s a really key part of what we do – if we were an Australian-only publisher we wouldn’t be doing a good job for our artists. If you place a well known New York artist alongside an unknown Melbourne artist that can only be good for them, it can help shine a light on different parts of the catalogue. “We don’t stock any major publishers – we feel like we stock a lot of publishers that are a little younger, that share an attitude around scale of publishing and around experimental and sensitive content and form. You won’t find the big names in the store because we have a very specific selection.”
When you walk into the store, the books are the immediate focus of your attention – white walls, white shelves and a minimalist design draw your eyes to the beautiful covers on display. “When we were designing the store and thinking about how it worked, definitely Japanese retail was the key. We wanted to give it a very neutral look and to be very honest to what the building was like,” Dan explains. “We literally painted it white, hung some lights and then just did the rest ourselves. We never did anything to the facade – it’s a wreck – but you look through the window and you see a very beautiful little space, a simple little space. It was part of the whole philosophy too – being a really welcoming environment but never compromising on contents, so we stock what a lot of people would call difficult, but the environment’s easy. It’s all about saying it’s not actually difficult, not to be scared of it and that’s sort of why we tried to keep it white. It’s not about being elitist at all, it’s just about being specific.” This specific selection is what makes Perimeter Books unique, and it has created a community of like-minded people who share the same love for Perimeter’s collection as Dan and Justine. “I don’t even describe it as a market,” Dan tells me. “I think it’s a wider community of interested parties and in many ways it’s just about making your own luck, representing the books in the best possible light and always reminding yourself why you’re doing it, which is because you really love the content and want to get it out there.”
“We’ve really tried to engage more actively with the community in the last two years. We have really active programming – a talks program, an exhibition program. We have staff whose whole job it is to run the program, which is about inviting our community back in to see talks, share information about publishing and that kind of thing. It’s really grown from a very tiny thing to an important little organism in our tiny wedge of the cultural sphere.” I was curious as to how Dan and Justine
chose the name for the store, and Dan admits he’d originally intended to create a zine called Perimeter but the name just seemed to fit with the idea of the bookstore.
“It’s a bit corny,” Dan tells me, “but the allegory is relatively clear – it’s interested in the stuff that was on the periphery of the cultural discourse. We weren’t in any way trying to represent what was already established for Perimeter and we were also in Thornbury, which at the time seemed a long way away from most people. But also to be honest it was just a phonetic thing – I just like the sound of the word. “There was a lovely little moment when we named [the store] – we found out that there was another bookstore that stocked very similar content in the ’80s and ’90s in Collins Street called Perimeter. So all these older customers would come and say ‘Oh you used to be on Collins Street’. We’re really happy to carry on that legacy in some way, even if it was kind of a fluke that we came up with the same name.”