You may have noticed that we took a break this fall from regular posting at Bangback. One big reason for this is that in August of 2011, the Pinball team started an endeavor to publish content in our Scout Book format. We are so thrilled to be working with the Scout Book format in this new way, that it is absorbing much of our extra publishing energies at the Pinball HQ.

The first series from our Good Ink imprint was edited by François Vigneault, and it features the following classic authors paired with contemporary illustrators.

Vol. 1 “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce, illustrated by François Vigneault
Vol. 2 “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving, illustrated by Bwana Spoons
Vol. 3 “The Jelly-Bean” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, illustrated by Vanessa Davis
Vol. 4 “The Story of an Hour” and Other Stories by Kate Chopin, illustrated by Gemma Correll
Vol. 5 “Eve’s Diary” by Mark Twain, illustrated by Meg Hunt
Vol. 6 “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, illustrated by Aaron Renier
Vol. 7 “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, illustrated by Zack Soto
Vol. 8 “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Tom Neely
Vol. 9 “To Build a Fire” by Jack London, illustrated by Michael Hsiung
Vol. 10 “The Gift of the Magi” and Other Stories by O. Henry, illustrated by Kate Bingaman-Burt

With such a compelling line-up of authors and artists, we knew people might want them all. So, we offered the series as a subscription, and then culminated the effort with a holiday timed release of a super charming box set collection.

The earliest story in the mix is “Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving. One of our favorite Portland artists, Bwana Spoons, jumped on the chance to illustrate this iconic American tale. Andrea Raijer helped document by producing this video following Bwana as he creates his original illustrations for the Scout Books edition of Rip Van Winkle, and then tracing the path of those illustrations through the Scout Book production process. Chris Funk assisted with music.

It was such a fun project, we’re already hard at work on the next set! Stay tuned for more pocket-sized reads coming soon from Good Ink.

The Independent Publishing Resource Center has been Portland’s beloved center of the D.I.Y. publishing community since 1998.

I spoke with Rebecca Gilbert, co-founder and original director of the IPRC, about the history of the center, Portland’s indie publishing scene since the mid 1990s, and her role in Portland’s print community.

Where did the idea for opening the IPRC come from? Was it inspired by a space in another city, or a previously existing space in Portland? If so, tell us a little bit about the time leading up to opening.

Shortly after Reading Frenzy [a Portland art & small press bookstore] opened in 1994, I started volunteering there. It was in a very small space on SE Hawthorne, and then moved downtown into the space where it is now. I was volunteering there at least once a week, hanging art shows & working behind the counter. I think everybody who was volunteering at Reading Frenzy then would say that one of the most popular questions at the time was…”I really want to publish a zine. How do I get started?” So we found ourselves being the help desk for How To Publish a Zine. Which was fun, but there came a time when we wished there was somewhere we could just send people. We wanted to be able to say “Go here, and they’ll help you.” 

Old-school flier

How did it come about being located in the Pacific Building?

The idea for a zine publishing space was circulated for probably a year, and then Chloe Eudaly [owner of Reading Frenzy] ended up getting an office upstairs from Reading Frenzy, in the North Pacific Building, and we agreed to share it. It was my studio, and her office for the store. I was just out of school, and so I was working part-time at a print shop, doing workshops in the local schools, working for Powells Internet division, and making my own book arts work, trying to figure out what I was going to do next. 

After discussing it for awhile, we thought we’d turn our studio/office into a place that people could go when they asked that question ‘How do I publish a zine?’ We realized that we already had almost all the tools we’d need. We had a small computer (one of those early Apple MacIntosh computers with the square bottom unit!), we had typewriters, we had glue sticks, we had our own personal zine collections (which were pretty big at that point), we had workbenches, and we had lots of clip art, collage materials, art supplies, and tools. 

Did you open at that original space, as the IPRC?

Our first space was on the 3rd floor in a room that was 300 square feet, with a fire escape. It was a long narrow, rectangular room. There were great double windows that opened onto the fire escape, so you could sit on it and overlook Burnside. Here’s a rough floor plan, as best I can remember:

On-the-fly sketch

We had the zine library in crates, just stacked. A file cabinet. Two work benches, end to end, but against the wall with shelves underneath for flat material storage. We had a desk, with a computer on it. Shelves up on the walls. That was it. No photocopier initially, but as the space developed people donated all sorts of items that were helpful. Eventually it came to house a copier, two tabletop presses and a cabinet or two of letterpress type, bookshelves, and a couple long folding tables, and a big stuffed reading chair, in addition to all our original stuff. 

The original IPRC space

Has it always been a nonprofit organization?

The IPRC was not always a non-profit, but we did incorporate pretty early on. Initially we set up informal networking groups. They would happen in the space or in Reading Frenzy, about once a month. We had a Zine Publishers Potluck, where we would invite all the zine publishers we came in contact with or knew. We would do a little introduction and then just encourage the 10-20 people who came to socialize while they enjoyed the food. We had a Book Arts Group where we’d all make a book every month, related to a certain theme, and then everyone would exchange the edition. In those small networking groups we asked participants “How could we make a center that would work? What would it be?”

 So you were holding these events in your office space, and in the store, and were wanting to open things up more beyond your friends and self-publishing peers.

Out of those conversations and others, we formed our initial working board. There were 5 of us that served as Incorporating board members—as far as the 501(c)(3) went—Brian Bagdonas, Chloe Eudaly, K.T. Kinney, Amy Joy Tuepker and myself. Edith Abeyta, who previously owned Printed Matter in Albuquerque was an initial volunteer and organizer, though she decided not to sit on the Board. She donated the whole Printed Matter archive plus her personal collection, then set up the catalogue and library database. Dan Howland was also a regular volunteer at the beginning and up until a couple years ago.

The resource & workspace center idea seemed like a nonprofit purpose, and none of us could imagine making a for-profit venture out of it, so we pursued official 501(c)(3) status with the assistance of Kohel Haver’s legal expertise. The directors of Write Around Portland, Ben Moorad and Liza Halley, had also just finished incorporating their organization and were very helpful in sharing information. I guess we felt like our organization fell in line with a lot of other literary or artistic groups in Portland, who were all registered as non-profits. 

The process of establishing a non-profit organization did help give us a reason to come up with a structure for the organization, we had to think of all the programming in terms of it’s educational value and public accessibility. We all wanted to make sure that the resources were affordable, and that we weren’t repeating services already offered by other organizations in town. We wanted it to become more than a place where our friends could gather, but serve a larger purpose.

How did the organization work in the early days? I don’t imagine a lot of money was floating around.

When we first rented that space and started the organization, everyone just pitched in for rent every month. The rent was $210 a month, I think, with utilities included. Initially Chloe and I split that, and then the Board split it. We paid that way until we got our first grant, which was a Literary Arts Fellowship for Publishers award for $1,000. Almost a half year of rent! We didn’t have many other costs at that point, so that was pretty magical. We did charge a yearly user fee, the same as it’s set up now, but back then it was $20 for a year. Library use was free, as it is now. We had a little less than 100 members that first year, if I recall correctly. That helped us cover operations. People donated materials and services, and we got along on volunteer workshop instructors and occasional purchases of glue sticks, stamp pads or paper stock.

A member binding zines with needle and thread. 2011.

I get a sense these days, as a volunteer for the last two years– and I’m sort of “old hat” now, having been involved that long– that these days the IPRC is a very, very “open” community. It’s not “tight.”

It hasn’t always been like that, though that was our intention. It’s extremely satisfying to know that it has gone beyond that original group of zine publishers or comic publishers, and expanded to feel open & accepting. A lot of that has to do with the number of years the IPRC has been around, and the amount of work that Justin Hocking [current IPRC Director] has done and that Pablo de Ocampo [previous IPRC Director] did before him, to just reach out into different communities. Bringing youth in on a regular basis, and now running the new certificate program, have certainly helped expand the user base of the IPRC. That kind of increased programming brings a lot of people through who didn’t have access before or didn’t realize that they would want to use the resources. 

The famed IPRC yard sale, scrapbook excerpt

My introduction to the IPRC was through reading autobiographical comics by Portlanders from the early-2000s, and a “Zinester Clubhouse” was definitely the impression I got of the place.

For a number of years, through the time when I was Director, and at least part of the time Pablo was Director, there were a lot of the same characters putting in many hours to make the IPRC work. There might be someone new moving to town or someone taking a workshop that had never been there before, but on a daily basis if you came into the Center you would see the same people there all the time. We had volunteers who worked the same volunteer shift for five or six years, once a week. Plus they’d come by a night or two otherwise just to hang out with the person working that shift and work on their publishing projects. That cultivated a tight knit group. I think it was a constant struggle to keep it feeling like it was an open space and not just belonging to a few people. We had complaints about that a lot at the beginning– very real concerns. So despite the fact that we all wanted the IPRC to be a publicly accessible place, the fact that 10 or 20 people were putting in a lot more hours there resulted in a little more of a clubhouse feel. It also resulted in some marvelous collaborations, influenced people’s career paths and cultivated long-term relationships. 

Early on in the current space, a staff meeting

The production room. Current space. 2011.

Can you tell us about the IPRC’s letterpress print shop (did you start it, was it the original group, was it even always a part of the center?), and how those various tabletop presses and sets of type came to be in that tiny room?

Both Brian (Bagdonas, fellow founder of Stumptown Printers) and I were working as printers and were really interested in adding letterpress capabilities to the IPRC, so people could use them to print covers for their zines, promotional postcards, bookmarks, or whatever they could think of. I think the first tabletop presses (both Kelsey 5×8′s) were donated in 2000. They came from a woman who’s husband was one of the first CEO’s of Tektronix, and whose hobby as a young boy was to produce a neighborhood newsletter on a similar press. The presses were really rusty, but once we cleaned them up and purchased new rollers, they were functional.  Presses and type continued to be donated or purchased for reduced rates from local and regional printers who were in support of the IPRC’s mission, often because of referrals through Oregon College of Art & Craft or the Pacific Northwest College of Art. The sign press was donated by Friendly House, I believe, as they were no longer using it. 

The room the press equipment is in currently used to be the offices for Write Around Portland (WRAP), we moved them in there when WRAP moved upstairs in the North Pacific Building. Previously, the press room was where the administrative offices now are. 

Cleaning presses, back in the day.

A member setting type in the print shop. 2011.

The IPRC’s letterpress classes and relatively open shop, as well as the exposure I had to many packages & posters that Stumptown has printed, were an enormous part of why I became interested in lettepress. I imagine that similar cases are true for many Portlanders, and that work you’ve done has directly influenced Portland’s penchant for letterpress. How did you come into being a printer, working in Portland, and making a life out of it?

I moved to Portland in 1994 to attend PNCA as a transfer student in Graphic Design. I have always had a particular interest in typography, so my eventual pursuit of printing, and particularly letterpress printing is not too far off. I modified my degree at PNCA to include courses at OCAC, with a focus on publication design. This also drew in my experiences as a zine publisher, and allowed me to delve into book arts and printing as part of my studies. As a student of design I was required to complete an internship, so I approached fellow Vermonter Pete McCracken about working with him at Crack Press on some digital type design. In the course of the internship, I discovered I was much more interested in the physical nature of type than the digital version, so began working on his press equipment to learn more about letterpress printing. That led to part-time contracted work as a printer for Crack Press, and then ultimately to my establishing Stumptown Printers with brothers Eric & Brian Bagdonas. I’ve been lucky in that my lifestyle and career choices have worked out so far. Stumptown Printers has been around for 12 years now, and we continue to enjoy what we do and value the people we work with.

It’s nice to think that through the IPRC and our work at Stumptown Printers we are a part of encouraging and supporting a vibrant printing community in Portland. I really think that Barb Tetenbaum and Inge Bruggeman at OCAC have especially done a lot to encourage the growth of this community as well. Now with Em Space and the C.C. Stern Type Foundry (a newer non-profit organization I’m involved in), I hope that we can continue to emphasize the practice of quality creative printing and the use of hand set type, and to value the tradition of printing and it’s practitioners. 

Rebecca on WW cover. Remember the 90s?

The computer lab, dubbed "The Yeti Research Center." 2011.

How do you think the IPRC has benefited, or at least changed, Portland? Both for artists and for the general public.

I think it’s amazing that the IPRC has grown so far beyond our original limited vision of the purpose it would serve. It has been the birthplace of many a publishing venture, small creative business, and long-term romance. There are people who started printing at the IPRC who have gone on to study at OCAC or get a degree from another Book Arts program. There are people who published their first zine at the Center and now run small publishing houses. There are volunteers who discovered their passion for teaching and organizing through work with the outreach programming.  There are teenagers who found a voice through the IPRC programming. I think that because it has lasted and adapted as an organization, it serves as an example for those who are interested in starting other DIY institutions. There are still calls and emails from all over the country from people who want to know how to start something similar where they live. Hopefully it has offered the public a space encouraging of creativity and new pursuits related to publishing independent media and art, and skills to get there. And I hope it has become a staple in the culture of Portland, another among the literary and artistic organizations that help define this city’s quality of life. 

Profile from the WW

Each year in early September, Portland becomes a frenzied city of festivals and events. PICA’s Time Based Arts Festival happens concurrently with MusicFest Northwest, leaving Portlanders culturally stimulated and sleep-deprived. The city comes to life with performances, gallery shows, dance parties and live music.

This year, a celebration of the print that broadcasts these events will be part of the fun.

In conjunction with MusicFest Northwest, the ever-prolific Mike King will present Poster Mart, a rock poster show and sale. Fans and makers of gig posters are surely familiar with Mike King, designer and screen printer, as a pioneer in the world of music poster design.

We interviewed him on Bangback about a year ago, learning about his decades-long creative practice. This time he’s stepping into the role of curator, bringing together the best gig poster designers and printmakers to one place.

The Poster Mart will take place at the Jupiter Hotel in Portland on Saturday, September 10. From noon to 10pm, a spread of talented print people will show and sell their goods. Vendors will include Casey Burns, Guy Burwell, Landland, Keegan Onefoot and Furturtle Show Prints, among others.

Pinball printed up these special-edition posters, featuring metallic silver ink and a bright orange Pantone on French Paper. While Mike King’s experimental illustration style is ordinarily brought to life via screen printing, this artwork translated brilliantly to offset printing.

Get yourself to Poster Mart, Portlanders! The rest of you? Plan for next year, we suspect this might be an annual thing.

A trio of wonderfully Portland things: APAK!, Little Otsu, and Reading Frenzy.

And lucky for all of us (residing here in PDX or passing through), the month of August will combine the three in a triumphant line-up of events.

Tonight, there will be an art show opening at Reading Frenzy featuring APAK and Martine Workman, both long-time collaborators with Little Otsu. And all month long, Reading Frenzy will be hosting a special Pop-Up Shop for Little Otsu. The shop will include all five issues of the ongoing Living Things Series (the fifth, just released, is by Apak!), along with a plethora of wonderful journals, diaries, art prints and cards all published by LO. It will be charming and lovely. You should go.

More about the Living Series after the break!

Item: Saddle Stitched Booklet
Printing: Full Color Covers, Single color Interiors
Printing by: 1984 Printing
Dimensions: 5.875″ x 9″
Paper: 100% Post-consumer recycled paper
Available: $6.95 for one (special deals here for ordering more than one from the series)

The front door of their North Portland shop.

Stumptown Printers is a letterpress and offset print shop in Portland, OR. Started in 1999, they are most well known for their enigmatic media packaging.

I spoke to Eric Bagdonas, who co-founded the shop with his brother, Bryan Bagdonas, and Rebecca Gilbert. We talked about the history of the shop, Portland’s print scene, print in the 20th and 21st centuries, and much more.

Will you write us two word-polaroids of Stumptown Printers? One from the year you started, and the other from today.

From when we started in 1999: Chief 17 and Kluge after hours club, the nearby Hawthorne Bridge was still yellow and rickety, Martha Stewart still hadn’t discovered letterpress, being green meant you were a frog and if you were concerned about the environment you were a pinko. Stumptown Coffee opened the same year, guitar, bass, and drums ruled, CDs were king, and Clinton presided over a completely different time.

And now 2011: Three moves got us closer to the Willamette River, the first two presses have turned into eleven, iPad has a letterpress app, the Max train now travels east, west, AND north and south, bicycles are a thriving industry in Portland, farm to table and craft economy rules, the word “green” is obligatory in the marketing of all products. 

Where does the majority of your business come from, or is there a majority?

When we first started the shop, we did a little of everything, including newsletters, zines, business identity suites, fliers, posters, broadsides, and music packaging.  We’re all active in Portland’s music scene and even back then had hoped that we’d be able to work closely with our friends from local bands and labels on their printing projects, but didn’t really think that music packaging would become the defining characteristic of our business as it has. 

I’m not sure that we imagined in the beginning that we’d be a full-time commercial print shop, but instead had kind of a funny idea that the shop could function 70% as a commercial job shop, and 30% as a collaborative studio in which we’d work on our own personal publishing and printing projects. 

It quickly became evident, with the time commitment required of job work and costs of operating a shop, that it’d be best to focus on the commercial aspect of the shop. As luck would have it, we found that we could focus our commercial job work on media packaging, an area that we all wanted to explore anyway, and which still remains the majority of our business. The majority of our customers are independent musicians and artists, record labels, film makers, photographers. 

Print samples

I became familiar with your shop through record packaging. Limited edition, letterpress offering likes the Colin Meloy Sings Morrissey E.P. and more widely distributed paper-packaged CDs like Mirah’s C’Mon Miracle. Most of those CDs belonged to an era which has arguably passed– the early to mid 2000s, when the internet made finding out about independent bands so much easier, the way it does today, but illegal downloading was more difficult, CDs were still purchased regularly, the iTunes store wasn’t even open yet, and vinyl hadn’t made its comeback– how has production on music packaging changed for you guys since 2005?

When the optical disc was king, our interest in media packaging was similar to what it is now: we had the goal to create art-as-object, drawing what simply would have been commodity contained within plastic into full experiential expression of a musician’s or artist’s efforts. So during the time when it was almost obligatory for bands to have a product base of CD releases to sell and distribute, we were focused on hand produced, small run packages. Even our larger runs, like the Fahey and K Records releases, contained hand-made or custom elements. 

Some of our first personal projects as printers included creating packaging for our own bands, both in disc and vinyl formats. I still remember from that time (the early 90s) some of the iconic releases with visually stunning packaging that perfectly complimented the musical content. I don’t think that I’d have heard Shellac’s “At Action Park” or June of 44′s “Tropics and Meridians” the same way if they had been packaged in jewell cases rather than hand printed and assembled at Fireproof Press. Each package was individualized with the personal touch of the printer. 

Wooden type

 As printers, and in particular, printers enamored with mid-20th century production techniques, we’re bound by the physical constructs of the machinery that we’ve chosen to work with, and will consequently always have an eye on the tactile, material representation of music and art. The challenge will be continually drawing the two together: the physical printed piece with the increasingly less tangible digital audio format.

That said, compared to the mid 00′s, we’ve been seeing an amazing variety of packaging formats. We’re doing smaller runs and more involved custom work, and we are offering more types of packages for different types of media. Yes, we have seen more cassette and vinyl projects since 2005, and more limited edition CD & DVD releases too. Also, we’ve done packaging devoid of any media at all — elaborately printed lyric booklets or folders containing just download code cards. 

Eric Bagdonas and Rebecca Gilbert at work

Your shop, through both making beautiful packaging and also offering well designed blank packages to encourage D.I.Y. printing, has played a huge role in the improvement of production quality on things like self-released records or self-published small books, in Portland and around the world. How do you see it continuing its role into the two-thousand-teens?

We all grew up during the rise of the zine era, a time when writers and artists who created self-published work not only traded their finished work, but in many cases exchanged production ideas, distribution networks, etc. It was the inspiration of the collective work of that scene, both zine writers and musicians, that led us to explore the tradition of print. 

It’s flattering to think that our work here at the shop contributes to that dialogue, and that we’ve had some impact on the DIY music and publishing world. That’s fantastic. We’re very excited about continuing and expanding our custom printing services and also plan to continue to develop and offer new blank media packaging into the two-thousand-teens. 

It’s been interesting to see how both the growth of interest in letterpress (and home letterpress shops/silkscreen shops) and the technology available to home recording, mastering, and duplicating projects has driven the interest in blank packaging. It’s awesome that people can release complete albums by themselves, in editions of ten to multiple hundreds. 

Yeah, in this age of everything under the sun being visible, advertised, and for sale on the internet– there has been an increased interest in letterpress printing, especially on the part of DIY motivated artists. Any idea how to explain this phenomenon?

Yes, there has definitely been an increased interest in letterpress printing and rise of craft/artisanal work in general.  So much of our social life, personal interactions, and work occurs online and on screen, so I’m guessing that the cultural transformation toward our iDevices and laptops has really helped fuel interest in handiwork, craftwork, and generally DIY art. For one, the ability to be able to communicate quickly with so many people and the access to online information has fostered both the proliferation and preservation of many craft traditions. Also, I feel that folks just need a break and find it satisfying to step away form their digital lives to look for more physical forms of expression.  

There does seem to be a renewed appreciation of the qualities of ink and paper. Many artists have turned their attention toward letterpress printing over the recent years. With its strict reliance on the physical form, structure, and bold line quality, the letterpress technique is a fitting symbol of printing craftwork. In many ways it is the antithesis of digital image composition. 

The same goes for traditional offset lithography, which also has been around for the last hundred years. 

Eric Bagdonas

When we met up so I could tour the shop, you frequently brought up the battle of sorts between CMYK vs. Spot Color Printing, and the influence of technological advancements in the printing industry. Can you tell us a little more about that?

It’s funny, to address the bit about technology, some critics back in the day would have declared the death of the printing “craft” way back in the 1920′s and even earlier as older printers and typographers saw the meteoric rise and proliferation of mechanized type composition equipment. 

The printing craft did not die because of those advancements, but flourished during and beyond that time. Offset presses pushed production boundaries, the photolithography process and advancements in process color greatly improved the quality of art and photo reproduction, and introduction of that additional printing equipment may have helped contribute to the democratization of the craft as equipment became more available and affordable. 

In the latter part of the 20th century, it was digital technology that changed things at an exponential rate. Developments in the industry centered around automation and efficiency of production, as they naturally tend to do, and less on judgement of the craftsperson, creative problem solving, and human input. 

In that span of years, the graphic design discipline also shifted exclusively to digital composition. It is no wonder that there were big aesthetic changes in popular print media. Coupled with increased image capabilities of automated and computer integrated printing equipment and a carte blanche enthusiasm of a new technology, it seemed that the job of the printed piece was to emulate the tool that created it–the computer–rather than to celebrate the materials that it was actually made of–ink and paper. 

Technology dictated the aesthetic rather than attempting to follow a popular aesthetic, as was the case in the early development of moveable type and casting equipment which was originally designed to replicate the hand rendered letterform.

Up until a couple of years ago, a lot of printed media reflected the character of the computer screen image by using aqueous coating, highly processed coated paper, and impossibly fine microscopic halftone screen patterns to build print pieces that possessed a near “backlit” quality. 

Thankfully, by now we’ve learned that some design is best relegated to the computer screen, and shouldn’t be put on paper. There are still the occasional cries of “the death of print,” but instead, we now think of this time as its liberation. After all, the sometimes reckless immediacy of the digital image has its antidote; the delete key.  

The tactile feel that so many people consider emblematic of letterpress printing was as much a quality of the print technology of the time as it was of the letterpress process. Use of spot color rather than CMYK (four color process) was the standard in both letterpress and offset printing and a variety of interesting paper stocks, primarily uncoated, were used for both letterpress and sheet fed offset. Color separations were created mechanically rather than digitally. Trapping (color overlap) was exaggerated to accommodate registration variances. 

The key characteristic of what I consider the heyday of print was use of spot color. Spot color gives a unique character that cannot be matched by digital processes or CMYK. What you physically mix on the glass with an ink knife and put in the press is what you get- bold, pure color.  A printed piece using just two thoughtfully chosen spot ink colors will likely draw more interest even than one printed in four color process (CMYK).  

If it can be believed that print will settle into a role that is similar to that of analog media and vinyl records; less of a utilitarian necessity than a object of beauty and ornamentation, then we want to celebrate its simple functionality through spot color. 

Tell us about two major book projects the shop has completed.

Rebecca just finished designing and printing a book written by Colin Meloy and illustrated by Carson Ellis, “The Grievous Demise of Mr. Whitley Rackham.”  A Victorian ghost story featuring an English nurse and a soldier who has returned from the Turkish war front, the edition is letterpress printed, hand sewn and bound into paper covers. This was an edition of 200 pieces (174 numbered and 26 lettered/signed books), and a project that was begun years ago with some support from Literary Arts Fellowships for Publishers. 

Another interesting book project that we were involved with recently was one that we did for Temporary Residence Records and Eluvium, titled “Life Through Bombardment.” A hard bound book covered with green book cloth and containing 7 pages of original art by Jeannie Lynn Paske, each page also served as an LP sleeve and contained a vinyl LP cataloguing the first years of Eluvium’s recordings. There is also a beautiful fold-out piece of artwork and a library card pocket that includes a personalized & signed card for each book owner. The concept was created by Jeremy of Temporary Residence, and we worked closely with all parties involved to realize the final product in an edition of 1000 pieces. 

Tell us your history as a printer. What inspired you initially? Where did you first do significant work in print?

Although everyone at the shop was drawn to print through independent publishing projects and music, we’ve had fairly different printing histories.  

Personally, I’ve always been interested in offset printing, as it was offset shops and operators that I first encountered. In the early 90s, while working on a 7″ record project, I was led to visit Lakeside Press in Madison, Wisconsin. That was really inspiring to me, and I feel that visit planted the seed for me, that I wanted to become a printer. It was the visceral draw of the process-the sound of chattering delivery chains, oscillating rollers, milling ink & whoosh of air pumps, the budum! budum! of impression cylinders, the smell of ink and freshly oiled machines-as much as it was the fascination with the final printed piece. 

More print samples

The fact that you could start with raw material–blank paper, and end the day with beautifully printed and finished record covers, by the effort of hand work and calculated control of mainly manual machinery was very satisfying. 

I became attracted to the aesthetic of manual image composition using photo lithography, and was inspired by the work of small shops of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s that made the most of older small-format machinery, both offset and letterpress. The work of New Earth Press, Inkworks, Fred Woodworth, Punks with Presses, was influential, and also searching out old chapbooks and political pamphlets produced by small offset shops and artist cooperatives of the1970s and 80s. 

I did some time working at chain print shops, but it wasn’t until I got a job at an independent print shop here in the mid 90s called Pacific Coast Printing that I really got hooked on printing. The production area of that shop was like a monument to pre-digital print. There were presses and parts of all types of small format printing machines-American Type Founders, Itek, Hamada, Multilith, ABdick, a buried C&P platen press there, and exposure units, stripping and manual layout equipment, cameras, bindery equipment, etc. It was beautiful chaos. 

I learned a lot from two amazing printers there, the owner was a lady from New York who could fix anything and make AB Dicks print like they were Heidelbergs, and a guy who was a real character. A life-long printer and mechanical wizard, he once disassembled a 1950s Harris 29 down to the frame so that he could paint it his favorite color.

What would your ultimate print project fantasy dream be?

I’m still interested in pre-digital manual artwork composition in the era of the mechanical paste-up, and generally interested in the amazing spot color work done in small print shops through the 20th century. When printers designed for economy of color, some really creative techniques were used to get the most out of one or two spot pantone colors. I’d like to continue to explore this era of print, and through incorporating some of these techniques, create a portrait study in print featuring Portland musicians who have been influential to me. Maybe not on the level of “ultimate,” but that’s my current print project fantasy.  

What are some current projects Stumptown is working on? What can we expect to see in the rest of 2011?

There’s been a recent resurgence of interest here at the shop in typecasting, hand composition, and the origin of the moveable type. Brian and Rebecca, the other two founders of the Stumptown Printers, have long had a simmering interest in monotype equipment, thanks largely due to the inspiration of our typography and printing mentors Jules Faye and the late Christopher Stern. Stern & Faye have been a very important influence on all of us, both personally and as printers, and when Chris Stern passed away, Brian and Rebecca, along with some of Stern & Faye’s other print colleagues and students, decided to create a non-profit organization to preserve Stern’s Monotype foundry. The organization manages a working museum that has recently opened here in Portland  called CC Stern Foundry. 

Linotype machine

 Additionally, we’ve acquired a Linotype 31 here at the shop, and Brian has taken the restoration and maintenance of this machine on as a personal project. Easier access to composition and casting equipment will undoubtedly shape our future work here at the shop. We’ve scheduled in a couple of art prints for the upcoming months and this week we will be printing our first packaging job using type composed and cast on the Linotype. We also plan on producing more book and broadside work in the near future, involving musicians and writers that we’ve worked with over the years. 

The newspaper industry has certainly seen major changes in the two decades since I toured that printing plant, but the magic of the newspaper format continues to inspire.

Enter a new kind of Newspaper Club. The Creative Kind.

Founded on a whim three years ago by the British Design firm, Really Interesting Group, The Newspaper Club allows anyone to create and produce their own newspaper, and it has gained quite a following in the past few years.

The types of newspapers being produced range from personal (wedding programs and portfolios) to expressive (limited-edition art projects) to political (such as a local protest about a school closing). Interested participants can order as few as one, to more than 5000, delivery included. It is a based on a group purchase model, with projects going to press twice per week. It is a novel and brilliant idea, and allows public access to a format that is normally only available to publishers or entities with really large print runs.

It feels nostalgic and forward thinking at the same time, using the power of online ordering to reach a large international audience, while harnessing that global momentum to purchase printing at a local level in the UK.

One of the co-founders, Russell Davies, was quoted recently on the Huffington Post explaining, “We’re not saving newspapers, we’re democratising newsprint.”

I’d call that a Really Interesting Idea.

Images courtesy of The Newspaper Club.

As a build-up to next year’s Documenta 13, German publisher Hatje Cantz and Documenta will be releasing a series of one hundred booklets all about notes and notetaking. Drawing from authors, artists, academics and more, the series will be available in August. Each release is $10, and the first is an essay from anthropologist Michael Taussig about fieldwork notebooks and how notebooks become fetishized by their users. What irony,” he posits, “that the anthropologist, namely myself, given to studying fetishism, should have unwittingly developed with his notebooks a fetish all of his own and become not only a slave to that fetish but enamored of it!”

Wow, theory and inspiration about notebooks for a notebook geek who loves theory and inspiration. I do believe I want them all!

Great Gatsby Business Card Print

For Print Only (FPO) is a division of Underconsideration that aims to showcase the most compelling work being designed and produced for print. By doing so, they also celebrate the (not-always-so) simple truth that print is alive and kicking. This year they launched their first ever FPO print awards, and we love the chance to see all the beautiful work being honored in the process.

The grand prize went to the Great Gatsby letterpress poster designed by The Heads of State. Inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s who’s who list of the jazz age, Jason Kernevich and Dustin Summers decided to produce an imagined catalog of all the business and personal cards for the VIPs that attended Gatsby’s parties. The result is a stunning array of forty-eight beautifully designed and printed calling cards. Each one unique, clever, and evocative of the glamourous “roaring twenties” era.

Item: Poster
Printing: 4-color letterpress
Printing by: Studio on Fire
Dimensions: 18″ x 24″
Paper: 20pt. 140 lb French Poptone Sweet Tooth
Available: $60, Hand signed and sealed from The Heads of State

Pocket sized reads from yesteryear

Though faded by time, and worn by use, these Little Blue Books still astonish modern-day me with their ability to deliver such a hefty dose of information in the compact 3.5″ X 5″ format. The series was devised by Emanuel and Marcet Haldeman-Julius in 1919, and the name changed (along with the color of the cover paper) from the People’s Pocket Series, to Appeal Pocket Series, then Ten Cent Pocket Series, finally hitting its stride in 1923 with Little Blue Books. Their lofty goal was to distribute literature, ideas, and information to as wide an audience as possible via the affordable and approachable pocket-sized format. They strove to create a “University in Print.”

In 1919 The Haldeman-Julius couple purchased a publishing house in Girard, Kansas from the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason that E. Haldeman-Julius had been editing. Equipped with the printing presses and mailing list of 175,000 names, they sent out a call for subscribers to their series. $5 for 50 titles. A dime a booklet. 5000 readers took them up on the offer, and they had $25,000 to start their endeavor.

Soon the series’ popularity had spread around the globe, and the venture was producing up to 65,000 booklets a day, resulting in a staggering 300,000,000 over the lifetime of the project. Over 2000 titles total. Bookstores stocked special racks with the Little Blue Books, and they found their way into many a person’s pockets (including Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Studs Terkel).

The publishing company lost steam after WWII, when Haldeman-Julius was placed on the FBI enemy list. Under J. Edgar Hoover’s watch, the FBI disliked the series’ frank treatment of topics like socialism, and homosexuality, and that soon led to a decline in distribution at bookstores. The series continued as a mail-order enterprise until the publishing house and printing plant burned in 1978.

I, for one, would love to see a twenty-first century revival of the Pocket Sized University.

By Tom Waits

I will be the first to admit, the power of print continues to blow my mind.

But every once in a while, it REALLY blows my mind. Let’s take for example, a poem that raises nearly $90,000 for assistance to the homeless, and does it prior to actually being printed and released. Simply the promise of the printed piece was enough to kickstart the fundraising.

Of course, it’s not any poem. It’s Seeds on Hard Ground, by Tom Waits. And, it’s not any method of distribution, the two chapbook editions were beautifully designed by Johnny Brewton of X-Ray Book Co., carefully crafted by Pinball and expertly released by the team at Anti-Records. But it still raised $90,000 for people who really needed it. And the chapbooks will endure in collections around the world as tangible reminders of the intellect and generosity of Tom Waits. It’s more than the power of print. It’s the power of print in tandem with great content, big hearts, and a very worthy cause.

The poem was inspired by Michael O’Brien’s photographs of the homeless. A re-arranged version of the poem appears alongside O’Brien’s portraits in his book Hard Ground.

The chapbooks are completely sold out. But you can still donate to charities selected by Tom Waits, The Redwood Empire Food Bank, and Sonoma County’s Homeless Referral Services and Family Support Center operated by Catholic Charities.