Salutations and introductions

Circle Eh!

Hi all,

Anarchist printer from north of the border. Been collecting and reselling printing equipment and publishing books, zines, posters for 10 years and amassed a good collection of knowledge and equipment.

I have also worked in a print shop and worked with modern and janky equipment. Also made connections with the trade side of printing, along with connections for sending out work when you don't have the equipment to accomplish a task yourself, or are looking for a part or all of your project to be done out of house.

Stoked this project exists. Will try to chime in on conversations and contribute. Would also love to see people share some of the muscle memories and tricks people here have worked out when working with the generic Chinese made finishing equipment we likely all share in our shops.

My project is between names and moving cities, but currently only a hand to hand distro. Hopefully that will change with new collaborations in the coming year.

Hurray for anarchy!

another_distroist

Greetings fellow distroists, bookworms, zinesters, offline media enthusiasts, table-flippers and lurkers.

I’m gonna go ahead and make Circle Eh!’s thread here a place for introductions in general. I’m excited about this forum, and I sincerely hope it grows into a place for building up the infrastructure of an anarchist print counterculture - especially as the unreality of the internet becomes increasingly treacherous to navigate.

Im Another Distroist. 11 years of printing and distribution, 0 years of breaking even or functioning in a sustainable or reliable fashion. Hoping to change that this year.

Looking to lease-to-own a digital press sometime soon, partially so that I can hook up homies with at-cost printing, but also so that I can “work” for myself and open up some time and space in my life. I’m a little intimidated by the scale of this commitment though, as I’m sure there’s plenty of moving parts I haven’t considered. I’ve refurbished small printers in the past but nothing really beyond a small office copier. I’ve heard a lot of good things about the Konica Minolta AccurioPress series, especially their booklet finishers. No specific questions just yet. Mostly excited to talk to yinz.

unnona

Hi! I'm unnona, have wanted to join up here for a while but life gets in the way. I'm based in the global south and have a collective I'm working with - we are wanting to open a press in the next couple years.

Initially we're thinking we'll reprint stuff that already exists that is appropriate to our context until we can start building some series of new, context-emergent texts to build anarchic ideas in our local networks. This will also have to involve building a reading culture, which doesn't exist much here - so we'll be trying to do audio versions of all our texts as well that we plan to circulate over messaging apps and local radio stations.
We are not very experienced at writing our own texts so it is going to be a journey.

Historically in collectives I have been in we have done layout for texts we want printed and then just sent them to printers who have printed them for us. It was a pretty effective route. But we are interested to have our own infrastructure going forward and also to make it available to other radical projects in our part of the world.

I'm excited about Open Distro and hoping it will be a useful resource.