The Independent Publishing Resource Center, A History

The Independent Publishing Resource Center has been Portland’s beloved center of the D.I.Y. publishing community since 1998.

I spoke with Rebecca Gilbert, co-founder and original director of the IPRC, about the history of the center, Portland’s indie publishing scene since the mid 1990s, and her role in Portland’s print community.

Where did the idea for opening the IPRC come from? Was it inspired by a space in another city, or a previously existing space in Portland? If so, tell us a little bit about the time leading up to opening.

Shortly after Reading Frenzy [a Portland art & small press bookstore] opened in 1994, I started volunteering there. It was in a very small space on SE Hawthorne, and then moved downtown into the space where it is now. I was volunteering there at least once a week, hanging art shows & working behind the counter. I think everybody who was volunteering at Reading Frenzy then would say that one of the most popular questions at the time was…”I really want to publish a zine. How do I get started?” So we found ourselves being the help desk for How To Publish a Zine. Which was fun, but there came a time when we wished there was somewhere we could just send people. We wanted to be able to say “Go here, and they’ll help you.” 

Old-school flier

How did it come about being located in the Pacific Building?

The idea for a zine publishing space was circulated for probably a year, and then Chloe Eudaly [owner of Reading Frenzy] ended up getting an office upstairs from Reading Frenzy, in the North Pacific Building, and we agreed to share it. It was my studio, and her office for the store. I was just out of school, and so I was working part-time at a print shop, doing workshops in the local schools, working for Powells Internet division, and making my own book arts work, trying to figure out what I was going to do next. 

After discussing it for awhile, we thought we’d turn our studio/office into a place that people could go when they asked that question ‘How do I publish a zine?’ We realized that we already had almost all the tools we’d need. We had a small computer (one of those early Apple MacIntosh computers with the square bottom unit!), we had typewriters, we had glue sticks, we had our own personal zine collections (which were pretty big at that point), we had workbenches, and we had lots of clip art, collage materials, art supplies, and tools. 

Did you open at that original space, as the IPRC?

Our first space was on the 3rd floor in a room that was 300 square feet, with a fire escape. It was a long narrow, rectangular room. There were great double windows that opened onto the fire escape, so you could sit on it and overlook Burnside. Here’s a rough floor plan, as best I can remember:

On-the-fly sketch

We had the zine library in crates, just stacked. A file cabinet. Two work benches, end to end, but against the wall with shelves underneath for flat material storage. We had a desk, with a computer on it. Shelves up on the walls. That was it. No photocopier initially, but as the space developed people donated all sorts of items that were helpful. Eventually it came to house a copier, two tabletop presses and a cabinet or two of letterpress type, bookshelves, and a couple long folding tables, and a big stuffed reading chair, in addition to all our original stuff. 

The original IPRC space

Has it always been a nonprofit organization?

The IPRC was not always a non-profit, but we did incorporate pretty early on. Initially we set up informal networking groups. They would happen in the space or in Reading Frenzy, about once a month. We had a Zine Publishers Potluck, where we would invite all the zine publishers we came in contact with or knew. We would do a little introduction and then just encourage the 10-20 people who came to socialize while they enjoyed the food. We had a Book Arts Group where we’d all make a book every month, related to a certain theme, and then everyone would exchange the edition. In those small networking groups we asked participants “How could we make a center that would work? What would it be?”

 So you were holding these events in your office space, and in the store, and were wanting to open things up more beyond your friends and self-publishing peers.

Out of those conversations and others, we formed our initial working board. There were 5 of us that served as Incorporating board members—as far as the 501(c)(3) went—Brian Bagdonas, Chloe Eudaly, K.T. Kinney, Amy Joy Tuepker and myself. Edith Abeyta, who previously owned Printed Matter in Albuquerque was an initial volunteer and organizer, though she decided not to sit on the Board. She donated the whole Printed Matter archive plus her personal collection, then set up the catalogue and library database. Dan Howland was also a regular volunteer at the beginning and up until a couple years ago.

The resource & workspace center idea seemed like a nonprofit purpose, and none of us could imagine making a for-profit venture out of it, so we pursued official 501(c)(3) status with the assistance of Kohel Haver’s legal expertise. The directors of Write Around Portland, Ben Moorad and Liza Halley, had also just finished incorporating their organization and were very helpful in sharing information. I guess we felt like our organization fell in line with a lot of other literary or artistic groups in Portland, who were all registered as non-profits. 

The process of establishing a non-profit organization did help give us a reason to come up with a structure for the organization, we had to think of all the programming in terms of it’s educational value and public accessibility. We all wanted to make sure that the resources were affordable, and that we weren’t repeating services already offered by other organizations in town. We wanted it to become more than a place where our friends could gather, but serve a larger purpose.

How did the organization work in the early days? I don’t imagine a lot of money was floating around.

When we first rented that space and started the organization, everyone just pitched in for rent every month. The rent was $210 a month, I think, with utilities included. Initially Chloe and I split that, and then the Board split it. We paid that way until we got our first grant, which was a Literary Arts Fellowship for Publishers award for $1,000. Almost a half year of rent! We didn’t have many other costs at that point, so that was pretty magical. We did charge a yearly user fee, the same as it’s set up now, but back then it was $20 for a year. Library use was free, as it is now. We had a little less than 100 members that first year, if I recall correctly. That helped us cover operations. People donated materials and services, and we got along on volunteer workshop instructors and occasional purchases of glue sticks, stamp pads or paper stock.

A member binding zines with needle and thread. 2011.

I get a sense these days, as a volunteer for the last two years– and I’m sort of “old hat” now, having been involved that long– that these days the IPRC is a very, very “open” community. It’s not “tight.”

It hasn’t always been like that, though that was our intention. It’s extremely satisfying to know that it has gone beyond that original group of zine publishers or comic publishers, and expanded to feel open & accepting. A lot of that has to do with the number of years the IPRC has been around, and the amount of work that Justin Hocking [current IPRC Director] has done and that Pablo de Ocampo [previous IPRC Director] did before him, to just reach out into different communities. Bringing youth in on a regular basis, and now running the new certificate program, have certainly helped expand the user base of the IPRC. That kind of increased programming brings a lot of people through who didn’t have access before or didn’t realize that they would want to use the resources. 

The famed IPRC yard sale, scrapbook excerpt

My introduction to the IPRC was through reading autobiographical comics by Portlanders from the early-2000s, and a “Zinester Clubhouse” was definitely the impression I got of the place.

For a number of years, through the time when I was Director, and at least part of the time Pablo was Director, there were a lot of the same characters putting in many hours to make the IPRC work. There might be someone new moving to town or someone taking a workshop that had never been there before, but on a daily basis if you came into the Center you would see the same people there all the time. We had volunteers who worked the same volunteer shift for five or six years, once a week. Plus they’d come by a night or two otherwise just to hang out with the person working that shift and work on their publishing projects. That cultivated a tight knit group. I think it was a constant struggle to keep it feeling like it was an open space and not just belonging to a few people. We had complaints about that a lot at the beginning– very real concerns. So despite the fact that we all wanted the IPRC to be a publicly accessible place, the fact that 10 or 20 people were putting in a lot more hours there resulted in a little more of a clubhouse feel. It also resulted in some marvelous collaborations, influenced people’s career paths and cultivated long-term relationships. 

Early on in the current space, a staff meeting

The production room. Current space. 2011.

Can you tell us about the IPRC’s letterpress print shop (did you start it, was it the original group, was it even always a part of the center?), and how those various tabletop presses and sets of type came to be in that tiny room?

Both Brian (Bagdonas, fellow founder of Stumptown Printers) and I were working as printers and were really interested in adding letterpress capabilities to the IPRC, so people could use them to print covers for their zines, promotional postcards, bookmarks, or whatever they could think of. I think the first tabletop presses (both Kelsey 5×8′s) were donated in 2000. They came from a woman who’s husband was one of the first CEO’s of Tektronix, and whose hobby as a young boy was to produce a neighborhood newsletter on a similar press. The presses were really rusty, but once we cleaned them up and purchased new rollers, they were functional.  Presses and type continued to be donated or purchased for reduced rates from local and regional printers who were in support of the IPRC’s mission, often because of referrals through Oregon College of Art & Craft or the Pacific Northwest College of Art. The sign press was donated by Friendly House, I believe, as they were no longer using it. 

The room the press equipment is in currently used to be the offices for Write Around Portland (WRAP), we moved them in there when WRAP moved upstairs in the North Pacific Building. Previously, the press room was where the administrative offices now are. 

Cleaning presses, back in the day.

A member setting type in the print shop. 2011.

The IPRC’s letterpress classes and relatively open shop, as well as the exposure I had to many packages & posters that Stumptown has printed, were an enormous part of why I became interested in lettepress. I imagine that similar cases are true for many Portlanders, and that work you’ve done has directly influenced Portland’s penchant for letterpress. How did you come into being a printer, working in Portland, and making a life out of it?

I moved to Portland in 1994 to attend PNCA as a transfer student in Graphic Design. I have always had a particular interest in typography, so my eventual pursuit of printing, and particularly letterpress printing is not too far off. I modified my degree at PNCA to include courses at OCAC, with a focus on publication design. This also drew in my experiences as a zine publisher, and allowed me to delve into book arts and printing as part of my studies. As a student of design I was required to complete an internship, so I approached fellow Vermonter Pete McCracken about working with him at Crack Press on some digital type design. In the course of the internship, I discovered I was much more interested in the physical nature of type than the digital version, so began working on his press equipment to learn more about letterpress printing. That led to part-time contracted work as a printer for Crack Press, and then ultimately to my establishing Stumptown Printers with brothers Eric & Brian Bagdonas. I’ve been lucky in that my lifestyle and career choices have worked out so far. Stumptown Printers has been around for 12 years now, and we continue to enjoy what we do and value the people we work with.

It’s nice to think that through the IPRC and our work at Stumptown Printers we are a part of encouraging and supporting a vibrant printing community in Portland. I really think that Barb Tetenbaum and Inge Bruggeman at OCAC have especially done a lot to encourage the growth of this community as well. Now with Em Space and the C.C. Stern Type Foundry (a newer non-profit organization I’m involved in), I hope that we can continue to emphasize the practice of quality creative printing and the use of hand set type, and to value the tradition of printing and it’s practitioners. 

Rebecca on WW cover. Remember the 90s?

The computer lab, dubbed "The Yeti Research Center." 2011.

How do you think the IPRC has benefited, or at least changed, Portland? Both for artists and for the general public.

I think it’s amazing that the IPRC has grown so far beyond our original limited vision of the purpose it would serve. It has been the birthplace of many a publishing venture, small creative business, and long-term romance. There are people who started printing at the IPRC who have gone on to study at OCAC or get a degree from another Book Arts program. There are people who published their first zine at the Center and now run small publishing houses. There are volunteers who discovered their passion for teaching and organizing through work with the outreach programming.  There are teenagers who found a voice through the IPRC programming. I think that because it has lasted and adapted as an organization, it serves as an example for those who are interested in starting other DIY institutions. There are still calls and emails from all over the country from people who want to know how to start something similar where they live. Hopefully it has offered the public a space encouraging of creativity and new pursuits related to publishing independent media and art, and skills to get there. And I hope it has become a staple in the culture of Portland, another among the literary and artistic organizations that help define this city’s quality of life. 

Profile from the WW