10?’s with Counter-Print book store owner & publisher, Jon Dowling

My Dad reading books of knights and battles to me in bed. Ghost stories by torchlight with my two brothers. Beatrix Potter with my Mum. As I reflect on it, the books they chose to read with me reflected their familial roles – protection, play, and nurturing. They’re fond, nostalgic, core memories.

Yes, it was Wim Crouwel’s ‘Kunst + Design’, a catalogue of the designer’s work from 1991. We found it in a shop in my wife’s country of birth, Belgium. We brought it back to my office, where I worked in a branding agency, and all of my colleagues wanted one. So the next time we went over, we picked up a bunch of copies and sold them to them.

Obviously, it wasn’t for profit, but it did provide a lightbulb moment. Is there an opportunity here for a website selling hard-to-find/out-of-print design books?

When we started out, we only focused on vintage books, so there have been a number that have come through the office, in and out of my hands. The one that springs to mind is ‘Herb Lubalin: Art Director, Graphic Designer and Typographer’, which we found at the bottom of a pile of cookery books in a ‘book village’ in Belgium; almost every shop in the village was a bookshop, which was a strange experience – but heaven for us.

We’ve always been avid collectors of visual ephemera. We collect, kokeshi dolls, Pez dispensers, boxes, bottles, sweet packaging, toys, badges, beer glasses, stickers etc.

It’s something that goes back to childhood for my wife and I. We gain pleasure through beautifully designed, and even badly designed things, in the same way someone might from tasting food, listening to music or reading. So it makes sense that we would wish to keep the things we find which stimulate this sense.

This is a tricky one to answer. Personally, if I’m reading for pleasure, I don’t buy the book for the cover, it’s secondary to me than the content. That said, I run a design bookstore that sells primarily through social media, so the cover is key. The cover will either attract the customer to read further or scroll on, so we spend a lot of time with our covers ensuring that they are simple, direct, explain the content within the pages and work at a small size.

We have a lot of customers from the US, it’s our biggest market outside of the UK, and customers there often tell us they are purchasing the books from us because the covers we sell differ from those produced for the US market. So it must matter to people.

The timeline is a little complicated but my wife and I were both working in London as graphic designers at separate agencies when we set up Counter-Print as a side project (2008). It was because the proceeds of this were roughly covering our mortgage, that it gave us the confidence to quit our day jobs and set up our own agency. This was what we thought our future would be, running a successful design agency in London, while slowly cooling off the Counter-Print book business.

However, after roughly five years, we were getting pretty stressed juggling the two and there came a tipping point when Counter-Print became more profitable than the design business. It was also all anyone wanted to talk to us about. We had to make a decision as to whether our plan B might need to become our plan A. We ditched the design company and pushed Counter-Print. That is when we expanded our own publishing endeavours, got rid of the vintage books and began selling new titles from other publishers.

I edit, design, write and publish the majority of the content we produce in Adobe Creative Suite by myself. I’m also in charge of the site and how it looks. We photograph all the books and social media content ourselves and produce our own merchandise. I’m basically working as a graphic designer but with myself as a client.

The closest thing I can liken it to, if you studied on a design course, is when your tutor said you needed to do a self-initiated project... Counter-Print has been a fifteen-year string of self-initiated projects. It’s fun but it’s a lot of pressure and I have to be very self-disciplined.

People always ask me if I’m concerned whether people will still read books in the future. When we started, the Kindle and iPad had recently been launched, so it seemed like a terrible time to get into publishing. However, because of this, we’ve never known anything different. I suppose I could have made a lot more money if I’d been born 30 years earlier but we can only work within the perimeters of the existing timeframe we are living. So I try and look at it from the perspective of being incredibly lucky to live in the age of social media, which has been instrumental to the success of Counter-Print and our ability to market our books.

People fear change and how it might affect them. They fear they won’t be able to cope or adapt. Now we are talking about Apple’s ski goggles, previously it was AI, and a year or two ago it was NFTs. The book endures. So, to an extent, it always will. Of course, the amount of books sold reduces as our attention is pulled this way and that.

However, the physical book does provide one thing – a valuable rest bite from all of this screen time. It is also a beautiful object – its visual appeal, tactile nature and smell can’t be replicated digitally.

In terms of finding a book in a second-hand bookshop, it would have to be Wim Crouwel’s ‘Mode en Module’. My partner and I always joke, when we leave a charity shop, ‘no Mode en Module’. They are so rare and I’m yet to snag a copy.

In terms of our publishing work, there is no unicorn. I don’t think you will ever see us publishing books for a big gallery/museum like MOMA or a giant name like Warhol or Banksy. Counter-Print, I think, is about exposing people to new things. Uncovering the work of exciting new designers, illustrators and artists you might not have heard of and sharing them through beautiful, affordable books.

We’ve always imagined Counter-Print as a lifestyle business. When I was younger, in my twenties, I always envied designers that had a studio in their garden or home. A place filled with light that they could potter to with their cup of coffee to create and write. I wanted a house that was filled with art and children that were brought up in this atmosphere, who would become curious about the world. That’s what we are trying to achieve.

There is no real separation between life and work – we work from a converted garage in our house. Our walls are filled with prints and gifts from the artists we have worked with and we have a son who loves to create and joins us on our work travels. This is the dream. It’s not for everyone – it’s also stressful, all-consuming and balance must be found – but it’s been an amazing ride.

I think they should send us a message, tell us what they like or what they’re looking for. We get messages like this all the time.

It reminds me of at college, when you’d go in and show a project and the tutor would say, ‘oh, have you heard of this artist, or this design group’. You’d go away, explore and have your mind blown by a new artistic movement, musician, film etc. I don’t think there is one book I could recommend – go to the site and explore it.

Tell us about what’s missing or what we should check out. I’d love that.