𝕻𝖊𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝕸𝖎𝖑𝖊𝖘 𝕭𝖊𝖗𝖌𝖒𝖆𝖓

Thank you to reporter @quinnmyers_ and photographer @big_blocboy_jb of @blockclubchi for capturing our excitement around launching… **Quimby’s Ink!** Our in house design and print service for artists and zinesters! (And comic book publishers, riso enthusiasts, poets, graphic artists, photographers, lit scene mavens, loyal customers… …) Quimby’s teammates Eric Manny Von Haynes and Peter Miles Bergman have combined their decades of experience running @flatlands_press and @is.press to offer design and printing services for Risograph, Letterpress, Digital and Offset! There are a couple links - to the article and to case studies and price sheets on our link in bio. Wanna’ chat about it? DM us or email [email protected]

Today is Intern Atarah Israel's last day with In These Times, and we are proud to present her exploration into the world of zine making, printing, and binding with Peter Bergman of @is.press in Chicago. Reporting and Video Editing: Atarah Israel @atarahhhh_ Special thank you to Peter Bergman @is.press

Books, Zines, & Comics! We sell ‘em! AND NOW WE PRINT ‘EM! 🤯🤘🏿⚡️ Quimby’s has launched a print and design service Quimby’s Ink! (Check our link in bio to download a price sheet!) We offer publication design, in-house risograph, letterpress, and tabloid color Laser Printing and binding for zines and comics! We can also assist in realizing your larger art book projects! Stop in to the bookstore at 1854 W. North Ave when Peter Miles is working F-M 12-6, or contact us to tell us about your project! Quimby’s Print Services is led by master designers, printers, and Quimby’s teammates Peter Miles Bergman formerly of is PRESS and Eric Manny Von Haynes of Flatlands Press Quimby’s Ink specializes in custom short run (5-500 copy) art, poetry, and literature publications. We can design your work or design and print your work – whatever you need! We can spend an hour laying out photos for your zine following your art direction while teaching you how to do it! Or we can spend an entire year designing a hardcover monograph of your work and guiding you through the process of getting it printed overseas for 20% of the cost. Every project is unique! Please contact us for a consultation. See our next post, or our link in bio, for some case studies and price sheets!

(3/3) Summer into Fall | Life update! The people in these pics, friends old and new here in Chicago, have been bringing the magic! Thanks friends! I’m especially happy lately to have my two adopted adult nieces (and former students) Zoe and Sophie [ @zoecpendleton & @perfect.blue__ ] here in Chicago (1st pic) and to have met my *bandmate*, ride-or-die, and new queerplatonic gf Annie Låda [ @svart.lada ] (photographer of the second to last pic of me, and jamming in the last video). Chicago summer and early fall are truly the best times of the year. Moving at the start of that seasonal arc was such a good plan. I’m not looking forward to the sun going away for five months. I had Seasonal Affective Disorder in Denver – with the 300+ sunny days a year! When I lived in Chicago 2005-07 things were DARK – literally. I still remember the late November day it was so overcast the street lights never turned off! I’m coming out the other end of really going through it. The one year anniversary of Heather and I splitting up, the practical stages of divorce, and adjusting to a financially precarious lifestyle has caught up with me. I also had a hard rebound by falling in love, and forming an on-again off-again on-again off-again relationship here which just ended in a 5th and final breakup on the occasion of my 53rd birthday – hopefully we can be friends. So, it looks like I’m singe for the second time in my adult life, which is it’s own whole unique brand of hell. I’m doing my best to be proactive about my mental health, and am trying something new – psychiatry in addition to therapy. I’ve gone on this life arc from feeling like I’m a little wild and prone to feeling down, to self-medicating for decades but thinking I’m “fine”, to getting sober and realizing I need to take my mental health more seriously, to seeking help and treatment. All that took 35 years of full fledged adulting! It’s never too late for self realization and self-work. I recently went to visit my 84 year old Dad in Wyoming – whose genes I’m wearing – and he told me about how he’s started working on his mental health! It’s never too late, and I’m working toward, and am hopeful for, my future.

(2/3) Summer into Fall | Art update! I haven’t made – and have no intrinsic desire to make – any art lately. I’ve been using my art muscle to make arrangements and shrines and instillations in the store and in my apartment, but just for a nicer environment to live and work in. Honestly, I’ve been backing away slowly from “art with a capital F” for so long that I think at this point I can turn and run and no one will even notice I’m gone. New people I meet ask me if I’m an artist, to which I reply “I was, but I’m ok now…” People who know me ask if I’ve had time to “make my own work”. But you know what? The bookstore IS my own work! Providing a platform for other artists, authors, and designers and working out the challenging problem of keeping an anti-capitalist quirky, modernity-resistant, cultural institution retail store afloat is the life-work I’d been looking for in this latter chapter. I’ve routinely been inspired and influenced by two artists; Theching Hseih who did a one year project where he didn’t make, or see, or read about, or associate with art followed by a 13 year project in which he made art but did not show it to anyone. Hseih documented the 13 year project with a single ransom style note reading “I kept myself alive”. Marcel Duchamp – the most influential artist of the current cultural paradigm – barely made art in mid-life, instead focusing on becoming a middling professional chess player (one of the top 25 players in Europe and a member of the French National Team!) Duchamp said that artists, painters specifically, should all be pensioned at 50 and “prohibited from working.” These approaches to the art/life process – in which life wholly subsumes art – are deeply appealing to me as the goal of the practice. I have been practicing, and am happy to show you, my friends. These photos and videos, which hopefully speak for themselves, represent unrealized and open ended “post-art” Psychogeographic research. I could probably make something closer to what we’ve all agreed to call art out of these lived experiences, but I don’t think I will.

(1/3) Summer into Fall | Work update! Now that this account is mostly personal I’m less inclined to post. But, maybe a quarterly update is needed? Tell me if you’re into it. If you’re a new follower this is what you get; unending story pics of discarded plastic flossers, random event marketing for Quimby’s, and quarterly three part, cringe level personal, max character count essays. Last time I checked in with y’all I’d recently moved to Chicago after resigning my 17 year full-time full-professor gig in Denver to help run “the worlds best book store in Chicago” (thanks to @dudlawson for the officially unofficial tagline.) Aligning my creative practices and work life has always been a panacea. I expend most of my intellectual and creative energy on my art practice, and most of my time on earning a paycheck. Work for money provides a budget, skills, and equipment for my art practice but hinders it by taking up time. I thought becoming a Professor was that. And maybe it is for someone. But not for anyone I’ve ever met! (And I know a lot of academics.) Art academia just piles the requirement you have a meticulously documented and specifically successful practice onto a demanding full time job. (If you’re ultra-lucky enough to get a full time gig.) You might be afforded time or funding, but not if you work for a low-funded public teaching school like I did. Running a business is SO different! I have three coworkers (as opposed to a hierarchy of 50 students, 8 program colleagues, 20 department colleagues, 1,000’s of additional University colleagues and staff.) You can immediately affect change! But you can also immediately fuck it up! I’ve been SO thankful for my Quimby’s business partner Cody [ @codykasselman ], who is my rock in this enterprise, Liz [ @caboosezine ] my mentor in all things running a bookstore, Manny [ @manny_suena ] my longtime droog, creative partner, and partner in Quimby’s community outreach and Angel [ @angel.xoxoxoxox ] the über talented spark of Quimby’s who we’re so happy to have back in the store.

(2 of 2) To freight ship a press you need it on rigged custom pallet that covers it’s entire footprint. The pallet is your press’s personal space bubble. Jacking the press up, putting it on blocks, and building a pallet underneath is well beyond my “tool time” skill set; so, I hired Alton, Colorado press mover extroidanaire. He also helped me remove a mechanically unworkable paper feeder to really get this press lean and mean. Alton also helped me think through the entire move and built the pallet so it’ could be cut down to get it through a 4’ door on the receiving end. Lesson no. 2 – just hire the pro. Total so far: $2,300… My pickup window was an entire day... I called first thing for a narrower window so I could have a couple helpers on hand. Dispatch told me no driver was assigned to it and to call back in three hours. Thirty-five minutes later there was a box truck in my alley... But the hero driver didn’t need any helpers. He loaded my press in my busted alley with minimal help from little ‘ol me. The 1,000 mile delivery time was two days! That turned to three, and then it was the weekend, and it turned to five days, and then 8 am turned to 1pm… Lesson no. 3 - don’t have other plans I have a bunch of friends in Chicago but no “buddies who are foolish enough to say yes”! I’m new to town, a business owner with a modicum of a rep to uphold, and this is some serious work. It could be easy, but it could be the chore of the year. So, I paid some new friends. I was referred by a couple people to Gabe from Hoofprint, who is a young version of Alton in Colorado, with invaluable knowledge and tools. My new buddy Dud jumped in with some press moving experience and a strong back. H has a studio one floor down from me and was down for the cause. I could not have done this without these heros. The 100 year old freight elevator – expertly piloted by building super Alan – kinda’ worked. The pallets were able to be cut down per Alton’s plan, and we squeaked through the door and dropped Chandler over a floor joist on this “max 100 lb per square foot” wooden floor. Lesson no. 4 - pay your help. Grand total: $3,100 To move an $800 press and a $100 cutter.

Mile High to Chi-IL photo dump! if they come for us in the morning… they will come for you at night… A bittersweet month moving from Denver to Chicago! Connecting with friends old and new. The second to last pic is of my buddy Lex (photo left) and Sam (on the right) a clean cut, polite young man in a flowey white linen jump suit that Lex picked up hitchhiking on his way over for lunch when I was back in Denver packing up my press. Sam has been on a spiritual journey for the last seven years. He goes where he goes, with no preconceived plans, with just a small day pack, largely relying on the kindness of strangers. I bought him lunch. Lex put him up for the night. If only we could all have such freedom, and sense of purpose. If only the strangers were always that kind…

(1 of 2) Letterpresses are actually cheap*. Often “free if you can come get it by Tuesday.” Even my clean and mean Heidelberg Windmill was only $1,250 ($700 to move it) and I sold it for $1,500. (*Platen presses are cheap, C&P’s, Kluges, and Heidelbergs, flatbed Vandercooks are more than I’d spend on a car.) My first press, a new style 8x10 C&P, was free. I eventually sold it for $900 and bought Chandler, my 10x15 C&P Craftsman pictured here, for $800 ($500 to move it.) My cutter was $100, “if you can come get it by Tuesday.” The problem is Letterpresses not plentiful. You can’t land in Chicago and to get a used $900 10x15 Craftsman at Crazy Dave’s Letterpress Memorial Day Dealbuster sale. And interstate moving of this stuff is an insane and expensive chore. Here’s what I learned, and the cost breakdown, of shipping a press a cutter and a bonus pallet of paper 1,000 miles. ///// Interstate Letterpress Move 101 ///// You can move a 2,800 lb. letterpess DIY with a pallet jack, a couple buddies who were foolish enough to say yes, and a 4,000 lb. capacity lift-gate truck. This is THE cross town move strategy. However, NO one will do a 1-way multi-state truck rental with a lift gate… I actually contemplated driving an empty Budget truck BACK from Chicago! At $1,500 for 5 days (of hell) and unlimited mileage it was the cheapest option, and I could load up the rest of the studio too! Your best option is to bid out to “LTL” freight shipping companies . “LTL” = “less than a truck load” in which your heavy stuff is commingled with other people’s heavy stuff. You need to wade through a bunch of incomprehensible jargon and paperwork (the “freight class” of a printing press is “65”). BUT – believe it or not – you can Fed-Ex a printing press, 700 lb. paper cutter, and 500 lb. pallet of paper from Denver to Chicago for $1,100! I went with AAA Cooper for $800. LTL shipping is based on both wight and volume and your bid is just an estimate. The actual cost is based on your real-life scenario and it’s always more. $800 turned into $1,200 once they figured out what I was actually shipping. Lesson no. 1 – it’s going to cost 30-50% more. Total so far: $1,200

3/3 | I’d spun my zine practice into is PRESS with a plan to see if I could make a publishing, design, and book sales business work within a 10 year timeframe. And you know what? Publishing is not a good business to go into from scratch. Printing is expensive, even the most successful publishers are always chasing an elusive 20% profit. I was able to eke it out – taking that 20% and shoveling it back into two letterpresses, a bunch of assorted equipment, and three paid interns. Last year was a banner year with so many commissions I had to limit my tax liability by buying a 3/4 ton 1963 Dodge truck as an is PRESS delivery vehicle! But it was never going to be a living. Seven years into my 10 year plan, this last year, life began to come apart. Heather and I started to decouple, my burnout became terminal, I started intensive therapy, and realized that after we sold our house, I was going to have a hard to affording something in Neue Denver. I found myself in Chicago once a month, hanging out with some of my best friends in the world, tabling zine gigs, and seeing someone super special. Last fall, on a flight back from O’Hare I caught an Instagram post announcing that Quimby’s was for sale and they were looking for someone to steward it into the next two decades. I read the article and thought. “I could do that.” Change can lead to opportunity. But you have to keep an eye out for it. And sometimes you gotta’ jump. Denver has been my home for the last 28 years – even when I did that first tour of duty in Chicago 20 years ago. The friendships and relationships I’ve formed here have shaped my identity, formed the core of who I am, how I relate to the world, and how I love. My friends here, comprised of my scene pals, colleagues, and former and current students have been my world. I love these people, and this place. It’s heartbreaking to move. But I’m standing still here. And I need to manifest the next great adventure in this too short and waning life. Goodbye Denver. I love you.

2/3 | 20 years ago, after 7 years of being an irascible Denver DIY scene high-case – and starting to stand still in life – I hatched a make-it-or-break-it plan. I was super tired of being an artist in a vacuum, with no reward beyond exposure. I decided to apply to ONLY ONE prestigious MFA program, become a professor if I got in, and if I didn’t… hang up on the art game, deliver mail, and try to normalize into society. Put all my chips on black and spin the wheel. Two years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago opened my eyes to a way bigger city to explore, a place vast enough to incorporate many interconnected scenes, and a level of ambition that exceeded the bounds of small city DIY. I met Heather in a printmaking class, opening a door to sharing 13 years of my life with her. I also started frequenting my favorite bookstore Quimby’s, and re-booted my mid-90’s zine publishing practice. Though I was open to moving to any University that’d have me it, (thank you University of Alabama for that rejection letter) I ended up landing a full time gig at Metropolitan State University of Denver, under a mile from the West Denver row house I still owned. I’ve loved being a professor! It’s one of the most intellectually rewarding and cool occupations and artist can have. But public higher-ed at a criminally underfunded teaching school is an exhausting gulag, and a young person’s game. To survive you have to have hard boundaries – and anyone who knows me, knows I’ve navigated most of my life with no boundaries! After I achieved tenure in 2016 and realized the treadmill wasn’t stopping just changing its incline, I started plotting a 10 year plan to quit teaching full time. It was hard to admit to myself that I no longer had the energy and openness I needed to be the teacher I’d always been. And also to accept that the discipline of design had passed me by – and had jumped off of printed pages designed by humans to small screens designed by machines. (Continued on 3/3)

1/3 | I’ve had a lot of people in the last few months express everything from sympathetic concern to vicarious elation at the _appearance_ that I’ve blown up my life! To review; Heather and I decoupled and ended a 10 year marriage. (This in no way I want to minimize. We said goodbye today, which was one of the saddest moments of my life, BUT this is all covered 5 posts back so I’m not going to dwell on it more here). I quit a full professor gig after 17 years, and bought the legendary zine bookstore Quimby’s in Chicago. I’m leaving a Gordian knot of loose ends in Denver and moving to Chicago Monday morning in a rented SUV packed to the gills with an apartment survival kit and three road bikes! Here’s the deal… Every time I’ve felt I was standing still in life I’ve jumped – full of fuck-it fear into a radically new phase of life. When I was young and everything I owned fit in a van it was a little easier. At 52 with a whole established life and a house full of hoarded art and band gear it takes a plan… I first moved to Denver in 1997 in the middle of moving from San Diego to Brooklyn. I was experiencing wild mental health swings due to what I now realize was the onset of substance abuse fueled bi-polar (type 2), deeply depressed, and often manically impulsive. To keep it short, my girlfriend and I broke up halfway to our new life. I went back to my first love – the Rocky Mountains of my Wyoming childhood, and found new love with my first wife Jess… Olde Denver was a magical playground for me, a tight knit community of skaters, artists, and musicians, living in punk houses that are are now 2.4 million dollar mansions, and warehouses that are now rubble under glass and steel high rises. It’s what I imagine Tulsa is like today. Nowheresville on the road to the great empty. A place where people make their own scene. I lived in a 1,200 square foot abandoned art gallery on skid row downtown for $500 a month that I could easily afford by cashing my print production paychecks at the customer service counter of the grocery store. (Continued on post 2/3)…