Misprint Publication Workshop

Location

We’ll meet from 4 to 5:30pm at Printed Matter, 231 11th Ave @ 26th St, for a hybrid session: on-site or virtual as you choose! Please alert Shannon by Wednesday end-of-day if you plan to zoom in! For those joining virtually: we’ll use a document camera to allow for super-amazing-immersive virtual engagement; we’ll email everyone a zoom link by noon on the 30th. And for those joining in-person, we’ll pass around our featured publications for your perusal, and we invite you to stay afterward to explore the shop and engage in further discussion.

Agenda

This week we’ll work with Elaine Lopez, our publication designer, and Printed Matter staff to explore a range of publication formats and consider how we can embody or activate “misfit” as a method, an aesthetic, a materiality, a placement, an epistemology, etc., in the thing we make together. We’ll also think ahead about how we can create a mutualistic set of misfit parts by designing a supportive, ethical, and enjoyable peer-review process.

Here’s a table of all the materials we explored at Printed Matter! Thanks, Elaine!

To Prepare for Today

• Introduce yourself to Printed Matter, if you’re not already familiar!
• Read Marc Fischer, Why Self-Publish Under Fascism? (Half-Letter Press, 2025) — it’s only four pages! I provided everyone with a copy on Week 2 🙂 Check out Marc’s Half-Letter Press and Public Collectors, too.
• Elaine Lopez will be leading us through the publication design and production process in the spring. Explore her previous work!
• While you’re at it, introduce yourself to Sojourners for Justice Press, GenderFail, Thick Press, Secret Riso Club, Further Reading, Small Editions (our colleague Hannah’s studio!) — and, if you’re so inclined, the myriad other presses listed among the exhibitors at the Other Islands Book Fair and the Brooklyn Art Book Fair (I hesitate to refer you to the New York Art Book Fair because you could drown :-).
• If you have in your own collection a publication — book, zine, map, broadsheet, dossier, whatever — that, to you, exemplifies “misfit,” please bring it to share!
• What if we thought beyond print? What if we cultivated a misfit mix of intertextual formats? (This would be very ambitious, but still: it’s nice to think about.) Check out the Institute of Network Cultures’ Exploring Expanded Publishing research project, and read Tommaso Campagna, Marta Ceccarelli, Sepp Eckenhaussen, Geert Lovinck, and Caroline Valente Pinto, “Manifesting Expanded Publishing” in Campagna, Ceccarelli, and Pinto, eds., .expub: Exploring Expanded Publishing(Institute of Network Cultures, 2025): 9-15.
• Let’s begin thinking, too, about how we might reimagine a constructive, collaborative, and perhaps even fun peer-review process for our work in the spring. Check out the Council of Editors of Learned Journals’ “Reimagining Peer Review” project (disclosure: I’m on the advisory board); and read k’eguro macharia’s “Invitation: Relation,” Imagining Freedom (October 28, 2024).
  • If you’d like to think more about peer review, offering / accepting / filtering critique, and revision, check out my “Peer Review, Editing + Revision” and “On Design Crits” Arena channels 🙂

Fieldwork Documentation