Does a book need to look like a book for it to be a book?
Last week, I mentioned that LitLit: The Little Literary Festival was taking place in downtown LA on the campus of SCI-Arc architecture school. On Saturday, I went to check it out (and kudos to the organizers, parking in the Arts District was free, onsite and glorious).
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Despite having more than 50 vendors and exhibitors, the event, which was co-sponsored by Los Angeles Review of Books, was compact and easy to manage. The West Coast was well-represented with publishers such as Two Lines Press, Wave Books, Hyldyr and Heyday on hand, as well as Southern California organizations, such as A Good Used Book, Angel City Press, Hat & Beard Press, Inlandia Institute, Kaya Press, Para Llevar magazine, Pop-Hop Book Co-op and more.
While there, I saw something delightful that caught my eye: A matchbook containing four poems – along with hand-painted matches.
After buying one, I spoke to Errant Press’s Alan Sobrino, who wrote and created the matchbooks and an array of other delightfully nontraditional books. Sobrino runs the press with his wife, Tania Chaidez Ibarra.
And the first line of the Errant Press manifesto? “Everything is a book.”
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Q. Please tell me about the name of your press and what you do.
So the name of the press is Errant Press, and my publishing project is mainly a game between content and container. I try to find the right container for the right content. I don’t do traditional codex books, but mostly an exploration about the limits of the physical form of the book.
Q. What’s something that really attracted you, a form that you were drawn to make a new kind of book?
Conceptually, there’s an essay by a book artist called Ulises Carrión , and the book’s name is “The New Art of Making Books.” This essay from the ‘70s really inspired me to search for different forms and limits of the book. It’s my main inspiration for exploring what I can do with books.
[Note: Errant produced a version of the essay as a tote bag, because, as it says on its website, “Carrión famously said that a book is not a bag of words, so we decided to put that to the test.”]
Q. You moved here from Mexico City in 2022. What made you want to come to Los Angeles?
I’m originally from Mexico City, but I used to live in Culiacán, Sinaloa, but it’s a very violent city in Mexico. And the violence keeps getting closer to me. My wife is from L.A., so I decided to move here. I think it’s better, the quality of life is better, the book market is a little bit bigger.
L.A. feels a little bit like Mexico, but not too much, and a little bit like the U.S., but not too much. So, it’s like the perfect middle ground for a person like me.
Q. You told me that you write for a living; what kind of writing are you doing?
I do scriptwriting for animation, mostly as my work. I write in Spanish, so I write for Mexican production companies, animation production companies.
Also, I have a YouTube channel about economics stuff, but it’s in Spanish. It’s called Indexcopio. And I mostly publish their little cartoons that are trying to be entertaining, like trying to be educational and at the same time, interesting for a broad audience.
Q. Can you talk about some of your work here?
Of course. So the measuring tape is a poem screen printed into a measuring tape, and the poem is about measuring reality with poetry instead of inches. So I thought the best place to put it was on a measuring tape.
The matchbooks are the most popular book in the publishing project. It’s a series of four very intense, personal poems that we’re trying to be fire. So I decided to put them in matchworks, and each face of the match is hand-painted by me.
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Q. Please tell me about your passports.
The passport is one of my takes about migration. It’s an anarchist passport. It’s a very layered book, because whenever someone buys it, I take a picture, I print their picture, I have a printer right here. I stamp it, and I make you an anti-citizen. And it comes with a series of QRs about open borders: Poetry, videos, economic papers, and different resources about open borders. So it’s like a layered group.
I also work with artists from Argentina and from Mexico City. I distribute their work here. They distributed my work in Argentina and Mexico. We have a little co-op thing going. So it’s always nice to bring voices from Latin America to the US.
For more information, check out the Errant Press website.
And one more thing, please don’t forget that many libraries have or are about to start their summer reading programs, which are a great way to get young people reading according to their interests, without being school assigned. It’s just … fun?
The summer reading program at my local public library — shoutout to tireless children’s librarian Mrs. Hinshaw! — continues to inform and enrich my life all these years later. Would I be writing this to you right now without the welcoming space of the Sierra Madre Public Library? I suspect not.
So check your local branch or system for details, but you can find info about the Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside or San Bernardino counties. (And there are city libraries and other systems, so look around at what’s available to you.)
Go for the books, stay for the air conditioning and make use of this powerful resource for young, and not-as-young, minds. See you there!