postcard from the printshop

wish you were here

We have a print shop in our apartment; in the mornings I usually do a few printing or design tasks, shuffle some paper around. Then it’s time to get ready, pack at least one (but ideally two) meals, and bike commute to a college where I teach in a print shop. Then often there’s another bike commute to WIP, our community print shop, to train volunteers or teach or work with a collaborator. All of this adds up to ~18 miles of daily bike commuting, and the last 2 miles of it, from printshop to home, are serene and slow. Minnesota’s winter seems to have petered out and given up, and biking around the city is feeling mild and easy and unrushed. During the night ride from WIP to home, pedaling through a handful of residential neighborhoods, I can almost see them in color separations (sunflower squares of window light rest on a navy Federal blue sky). It’s not warm enough yet for the air to smell like spring or really like anything, but there are signs: neighbors smoking the evening’s last cigarette are lingering on stoops, and scooters and toys start to litter front yards, not flowers but close.

This weekend WIP printed 11,000 pages; the odometer on my new(ish) e-cargo bike hit 1,000 miles.

I love doing things again and again, but I’m also a bit lazy, which is why I like digital printing so much. There’s something inherently beautiful about machines that are designed to print a page and then print another page and another page and another page. I like getting from point A to point B by making 90 revolutions a minute and having it add up to hundreds of miles, making tiny adjustments to tweak registration or kerning or the placement of a fold. If something isn’t worth doing 4.4 million times, is it even worth doing at all?

So far the WIP print shop log shows ~100 digital print jobs and ~30 riso print jobs. In the ~2 months since opening, we’ve trained 13 volunteers, opened for 80 member hours staffed by volunteers, and hosted 8 Open Copy events (walk-in copy/print/scan). We wrote pages of documentation and started a youtube channel and had some nice press. We placed our second wholesale paper order, and Aiden spent *so many* hours on riso fixes. Robert Baxter rebuilt the paper elevator on WIP’s GR3750, dialed in WIP’s Stich n Fold booklet maker, and did countless other projects that are keeping the printshop functional.

An aside: bless Robert Baxter and his new monthly riso service plans. Did we mention we love our monthly service plan with Robert Baxter? If you’re looking for a super knowledgeable and patient riso mechanic, we recommend Robert Baxter.

On one of the first sunny days, the printshop dog (named Smores) gets a lift on my cargo bike.

Kira the rad zine librarian catalogs zines. Thank you Kira!!!!!!

Lorelei d’Andriole smells copies of her new book, published by Late Night Copies Press.

I got to meet an Internet Friend who lives in Ireland; she came to WIP and made these beautiful posters. Order Éireann’s new book!

A Lesbian Princess binds copies of Better Homes & Dykes at WIP