Print shop build
logistics & money
We can’t eat books if we can’t make books. It’s really that simple.
I’ve written about why and how we started running a semi-public copy shop from our living room, and also about how it’s going. Imagine getting a nice note from a stranger about reading Own the Means of Production and Share It and then starting their own Open Copy event. That’s one reason to document your living room print shop.
We always knew the living room print shop was temporary. We’ve been accumulating useful equipment for a couple years, and just stashing it in our garage. Aiden and I dreamed of opening a DIY print space directly inspired by the IPRC in Portland, tossing ideas back and forth on long road trips to zine fests. We would call it the Workshop for Independent Publishing but figured a brick and mortar location might take us five years or more. The reason we decided to just … go for it … is that a trio of local artist offered us an affordable shared space to rent (especially big THANK YOU to Ethan of Yarborough for making a brick & mortar financially feasible).
Opening a print shop feels like something special I might only do once. I’m not great at keeping a diary, scrapbooking, or even remembering to take pictures of milestones. As we all enter our early 30s, my high school friends and college roommates all seem to be getting married, buying a house (how?) or having a baby (in this economy???)—life events worth documenting, where there might even be a hired photographer.
Celebrating alternative life milestones (like your first wholesale paper order!!!) won’t necessarily generate much documentation by default (a crumpled Anchor Paper invoice??). So papereaters is becoming a temporary container for documenting the print shop build at 900 W 50th St in Minneapolis, down to all the 2x2s and 2x4s from Menards.
If you (like me) think 2025 is shaping up to be a really, really good time to own a print shop, the startup costs might not be as expensive as you think. One reason for this is that as Robert Baxter has observed, most artist-run print shops are basically a salvage operation where all the equipment is used (definitely the case for us). Here’s the budget of our (mostly salvaged) shop build:
$500 - riso 3750
$200 - riso 3770 (together the two risos came with ~10 drums in various stages of functioning)
$700 - stitch n fold booklet maker
$100 - 2 big adjustable height tables (used legs & tabletops were purchased separately and assembled)
$200 - used IVAR shelving
$75 - new IVAR shelving
$400 - Menard’s (3 peg boards, 1 white board, 2 working height tables on casters that double as riso drum storage, assorted drill bits and hardware)
$75 - Coil binder
$100 - rhinotuff binder
$20 - jogger
$20 - electric stapler (with NINE power settings, it’s a beast)
$40 - pegboard accessories
$300 - stack cutter
$80 - 4 used ikea folding stools
$680 - wholesale paper of all sizes and kinds
$600 - computer
free - duplo collator, another jogger, comb binders, filing cabinets, monitor
That all comes to about $4000.
there are also some tools/equipment expenses that we’ll budget for on a monthly basis indefinitely:
$435 - base rate for service contract for 2 used Kyocera photocopiers. Service contracts depend on monthly usage and our actual copier bill for WIP will probably be a lot higher than just the $435. For example, our service contract for the living room copier averaged out to $800/month in 2024, even though the base rate is more like $100/month.
$100 - riso service contract
$20 - Adobe suite
Most artist/publishers don’t just have $4-5k sitting around. You may ask: if we are always broke how did we get this money? By selling one $6 or $10 or $12 or $15 zine at a time and never paying ourselves out!!! If you’ve ever bought a zine from Late Night Copies Press, thank you. Also, some of the money came from print for hire jobs I run on the copier in our living room. If you’ve ever printed with us, thank you and please print with us again since we just spent all our money on used printing equipment.
The grand total of our print shop build isn’t a trivial amount for us, but as I think I mentioned earlier, a lot of my friends just had their first baby. That’s gotta cost at least $10k a year, right? (a cursory google search suggests it might be more like $15-20k). So, opening a print shop might cost anywhere from 25% to 75% less than having a child, which people do all the time. From that perspective, maybe it’s not as risky of a financial move as it seems. So far I have no regrets.
This new print shop will be able to do a lot of things. One of its most important functions will simply be to offer color laser printing at less than half the cost of a Hennepin County Public Library (and a fraction of the cost as a FedEx or Office Depot). This makes a real difference for most zinesters/writers/artists/cartoonists’ bottom line, even when they’re making just 10 or 30 or 50 copies of a zine. But we’ve also designed the shop to handle higher volume production with a copier or risograph; a decent chunk of our shop budget went to finishing equipment like the stitch n fold machine. As Amelia of Anemone has pointed out, independent publishing makes sense for runs up to about 1,000 copies, but there is actually a big difference in scale between binding 50 copies of something yourself and 500 copies. At a certain point, you just need finishing equipment if you want to do anything else with your one wild and precious life besides collation.
Finally, there’s been so much non-monetary help with the shop build: especially Robert, Andy, Low, and astr press (who designed our website pro bono). Opening WIP would not have been possible without our friend Nathan, whose good credit score helped us get our photocopier lease. We cannot thank you all enough so I’m going to keep doing it for a while.
Keep reading papereaters for more reflections on the early days of the Workshop for Independent Publishing.
If you’re local: find us at WIP (900 W 50th St Minneapolis) every Saturday in February for Open Copy from 11am-5pm.
Use our templates to make your first zine/chapbook/comic and print it at WIP (or if you’re not local, I will print for you and ship!)
Become a member
Donate tax deductible $ to the shop
Donate something from this wish list - we could also use a nice monitor.
