I recently introduced Meier und Müller, the new publishing business I’m part of. There is good news, and there is bad news. Here’s the good news: Our first book, Conditions, can now be bought - our online store is open! Now for the bad news… (more)

Before entering the business, I was blissfully unaware of all the complications one had to deal with when putting a photobook together. Most of those complications you learn to deal with and take care of, but some complications are uncontrollable.

Our plan was and still is to sell books both from Germany and the US to make things easier for those ordering a copy. Unfortunately, the shipping company - DHL - managed to “misplace” the copies for the US market, just below a third of our print run. “Misplace” could mean they’re either lost, or they just don’t know where to find the boxes.

How this can happen is beyond me. In this day and age, customer service has come to mean passive-aggressive hostility (“Your call is very important to us. The next available specialist will be with you in three hours and five minutes.”), and we have been unable to get anything meaningful out of DHL. After days and days calling them they have, so they claim, now “elevated” the “importance” of our case to the “highest priority,” which was supposed to mean they’d get back to us within a few hours. That was yesterday morning.

Regardless, we’re a very small publisher and since this is our first book unfortunately we cannot afford to either send more copies to the US or to re-print the lost ones right now. Instead, we are selling the book, and ever copy will get shipped out of Berlin. As I already announced above, you can get your copy in our Store.

Unfortunately, if you live in the US or Canada this means that shipping costs are higher than planned. Andres and I are incredibly sorry about this, but right now, there’s nothing we can do about it. For our future books, we will explore other options to ship the US copies to their market so that they won’t get lost.