Henningham Family Press

Why did you set up the Henningham Family Press?

Ping: The driving force was wanting to make a living from our work. If you have a workshop-based practice, you can make a living off your machinery, no matter what happens.

David: Artists usually create bespoke items that should be worth a lot of money but without having a buyer for them. When we graduated from art school, we thought if we made work in multiple form, we’d sell more than if we made single pieces.

What do you consider the core of your business?

P: We want to write books, make books, sell books – beautiful books that have amazing content but are also things you want to hold in your hand, especially now that books don’t have to come in physical form. But to do that, we need a cash flow. Books are slow-sellers and slow-burners – it can take two or three years between the beginning of an idea and putting that book on a shelf.

D: We’ve ended up doing a third commissions for other people, a third live appearances like the Chip Shop, and the other third, our own publications. There were all these balls in the air. We grabbed three and started juggling.

How did you get your first commission?

P: My friend said, “I’m getting married. Do you do wedding invitations? Will you do mine?” And I said, “We need the money; why not.” Then we started getting commissions from other artists and professionals. It’s like a fashion house: making the couture stuff pushes your skills, so you can make the on-the-shelf stuff.

What is the appeal of printmaking?

D: It’s something you can always get better at. You can accomplish a print almost immediately…

P: Even with a potato. We’ve shown with the Chip Shop that you don’t need amazing kit.

D: Yet in 10 years’ time, you can be doing the same process with such virtuosity. It’s the same with bookbinding. There are several careers’ worth of things to play with here.

Are e-books the enemy?

D: No – the more the merrier. It means when someone picks up one of our books, they can tell the difference between this and Dan Brown.

P: iPods don’t kill turntables. We were in HMV and found all these Tom Waits albums and they were £25 on vinyl or six quid on CD. They must be selling or they wouldn’t be in the shop!

Is it hard working with your partner?

P: People said, “You’ll drive each other crazy.” But it actually makes things easier because we get to spend all our time together, which is what we wanted to do anyway. It’s why we got married.

D: It solves more problems than it causes. You can ask a lot more of each other when you’re married, because you’re family.

P: And if we’re doing overtime, we can get a curry and feel like we’re just having a fun evening in.

D: Without our wives complaining!

Do you take on different roles in the workshop?

P: I’m quite finicky about details and finishing. David is a potterer. But we have half a business brain each so between us, we manage a whole one. A lot of tasks in here work better with two people, as they’re quite mechanical. It’s when we’re working on a very long task that we often do our writing. We’ll chew over subjects for a couple of years at least.

What’s the best thing about your job?

D: We love having control over the way things come together. Even as a kid, it made sense to me that you’d draw the pictures, write the words and stick a book together yourself. When you get older, you stop thinking that way for no reason. Writers like W G Sebald have double spacing between their lines, but how famous did he have to be before he was allowed to publish that way? If I want a one-word page, I can do it.

Hot off the Henningham Family Press is Monday School, a book and wall chart explaining the narrative of the bible in the context of secular ideas. See their website for details.

Middle image courtesy of Sparks Studio.