 Hi everybody. My name is Sharon Sherry. I'm the Director of the Jones Library here in Amherst, and I'm here at Levelers Press with Steve Strymer, the founder of Levelers Press, and Anna Mullen, one of the worker owners here at Levelers. And I thought we would sit and chat and learn more about your organization. And I thought we'd start with you, Steve. Talk about the history of the press. It's interesting. There's so many different ways to think about how it happened, because it kind of happened and grew on its own. I've been a printer since 1973, offset presses and things like that. I was in another worker co-op. And part of my job there was to shoot film for producing halftones, photographs in printed material that was a camera operator, a plate maker, and that kind of person as well as a press operator. So I learned offset. And I loved the way of making photographs in offset and the impression of putting the ink into the paper and having the dots just right, you know, all that. So I came over here after 20 years offset. I came over to collective copies in 1997. And it was a really different world. We were still at 300 DPI. I think people out there know what DPI is. Still at 300 DPI, when I came, we were still, we still had floppy disks. We still had all, you know, we had no, I think we might have just started to have PDF files, Acrobat files. None of them were very stable. You had to watch them like a hawk. So, but gradually, as we worked on, we got color copier. We had our first color copier. I'm majestic. It couldn't do anything. It couldn't print on cardstock very well. It was constantly jamming. Color wasn't good. But then we like to call it the Rico Suave game. There's all these brands. And right now we have a lot of, I'll say it's Xerox machines. But the Rico Suave was the first machine production copy machine that could print at 1200 DPI. And it allowed photographs to be produced almost like offset. Not quite, but almost like offset. So as a camera operator and somebody cared about halftones, it really kind of floated my boat. And within short order in 2004, we had this series of books for the Northampton Historical Commission. And we're able to produce some of Stan Shearer's photographs here at that higher resolution. And it just became very exciting. So it was really at 2004, we started to print books. And one of our very first books that we published, not yet as levelers press, but as collective copies still, we published six books as collective copies. And this was the first one. No kidding. Okay. Beautiful. One of the sort of cutest titles ever for a book, right? Amherst, Massachusetts 01002, one of the best small towns in America. Absolutely. Okay. So that was in one of our great local folks, Vince Cleary wrote the book. And it remains a decent seller. But it's one of our books that went over 1000 copies and sales over time, which is pretty impressive. And that we were able to print it. This is a Badoni typeface, very fine serifs. And have the serifs be nice and clear. This really gives this fellow's heart, you know, flew in his chest to know what we could do, right? So by 2009, a friend of mine on the Sojourner Truth Memorial Statue Committee approached us about publishing his book. And this was our first book as levelers slavery in the Connecticut. And he encouraged us to think of a name. And so I had had read a little bit about the levelers in England, who fought to preserve the common land against the encroachment of the nobles. And I thought that would be a good name. I like the name. But plus, the idea that, and very quickly dawned on me that leveling the playing field in publishing, because at that point, and it's continued, you know, big publishers, the nightmares a lot of our customers were having. Because we would publish manuscript after we print manuscript after manuscript as they were pitching their books to big publishers. And even if they got picked up, they complained to us about the process. So we wanted to make a process that was happy and author friendly. And Robert and Bob Romer, he wanted his periods outside the quotation marks. No kidding. And I said, okay, we'll do that. That's the English style. He wanted it done that way. So that's how it started. And 100 or more titles later. I guess one of my other questions was, so in all your years, what changes in the technology or in publishing have you changed? There must be immense, other than just the DPI. We're up to 2400 DPI now. Very good. Crazy. And I don't know how technical you want to get about to be about this. But we can print and the sheet size changed. The biggest sheet size used to be 1117. That was a typical one. And I don't want to get too technical about it for which when you ran in 1117, you paid twice as much as you did for an 8th envelope. They then moved up to 1218. The RICO Squavé could do 1218, which was great. And then they moved up to 1319, which allowed you to print a standard trade paperback book, six by nine, four up. Right? And I'll just put it out there for one service click, for one, as though it was an eight and a half, 11. That's really what made things possible. And that became the way Xerox and Canon and RICO and all those companies were competing with each other. So they all sort of together went down that road. And that allowed a lot of things to happen. I think another challenge that I see kind of on the horizon is thinking about to what degree we want to solicit and by solicit how we want to solicit new work. How do you know? What voices are we are we looking for that we don't already have? And how do we kind of keep the literal means of like book production accessible to people who come in off the street and have an idea that they want to share? So how do you balance that accessibility and a certain kind of like equity in publishing with maintaining certain standards and doing it with, you know, when you're understaffed? I don't think those two things are in any way naturally at odds, like having, wanting to make yourself accessible to people and wanting your books to be good. But it's a problem. It can become a problem to be solved. I suppose in certain instances where you have two values, two collective values that can be at odds, which is we want this person to be able to distribute their work and how involved we want to be in it. Do we want to just be printing the books? Do we want to be printing the books and be a semi-distributor responsible for maintaining a catalog? Do we want to indefinitely maintain books on our shelves? And, you know, that answer really varies on a case-by-case basis. And I think having that flexibility to respond on a case-by-case basis is important, but streamlining that and making it more clear from the intake process to customers is something that we're going to be working on, I think. Does that make sense? Yeah. I mean, this is a whole new step for us because more people are involved. This kind of used to be my baby and the collective as a whole kind of said, yeah, you take in the titles you want and, you know, make them work. But it's something different. It's becoming something much different. So it has to become clearer. And we need to listen to each other about what makes sense and what we should be doing and all that. And do you all agree mostly? Do you all agree mostly? It's new enough. This may be our third book committee meeting as the larger group, something like that, something like that. So we're still finding that. I'm not too concerned for the scale that we're operating on. I think it's a sustainable model. People want books. The more the world becomes isolated and isolating and that experience intensifies for people, the more important it is that they have handheld things. And we get to do a lot of that work here. It's really exciting. Well, I have to say that's such an awesome response, right? We get in the library where we get to ask this question all the time. What are you going to do when the books are no longer needed? And it's just not the case. It's not the case. People need stories, people need, and the physical book. It's not going to be replaced anytime soon. No, I don't think it's going to be replaced ever. I think that the way in which we publish is going to change dramatically on a global scale. In terms of what we offer here, though, I think the demand is only growing because people really want to see their words and images bound in a book. And we kind of accelerate that process and I think make it more intimate. And there aren't a lot of places that do that. So to be able to, within a couple of weeks or, you know, a month, take something from a digital file to a product somebody can hold is not a feeling that I think is, you know, the demand for that feeling is not shrinking. If anything, I think it's growing. And how amazing that was feel for each of you to be able to work with these authors and to start with, you know, these are their babies and for you to bring those babies to life, that must feel so good. Yeah. Oh, it really does. And to live in an area where there's so many people who have those skills and talents and, you know, they're variable. That's part of our job is to figure out what they know, what they can, what level of, this is another big issue before us is what level of editorial help we can be or want to be and be able to build for, you know, that's, we're coming to this as a copy shop. You know what I mean? That's not an editorial house or it's not even a design house, but it's pushing us that way because it keeps happening. And a lot of us are, you know, read a lot and know a lot as we're succeeding kind of beyond, I mean, what do you do when something succeeds beyond your expectations? Like when you're chasing after it. Yes. That's, there's another challenge. It's a great problem to have. You think so. I'm sure it's exhausting. You think so at age 70, you know, I'm kind of thinking what is winding down a little bit. I'm not wanting to wanting to wind down a lot. I'm so lucky to be doing what I love. Right? But I don't really want to have the stress that some of the stresses that happen. And I probably don't deserve not to have them, but I kind of want. The other interesting thing, an interesting problem for us compared to other small publishers is that we have no relationship with any national distributor. You probably know all about Ingram and Perseus and those kind of places because as much as we've been able to have our cost be affordable, the unit cost on short run printing, right, our average run for a book as it launches, it's maybe 250 in its first six months. Okay. That's might be the average. Well, that doesn't allow you to have a unit cost that lets you use a distributor who wants to buy your books at 45% of the retail price, which is below cost. So we can't even do that. So back to the challenge. How do you not have that reach, right? And part of our mission from the get go is to have this ferment of the Pioneer Valley and here get out beyond us to get our authors out into the world. How do you do that when you don't have that reach? I don't want to say this, but one of the only ways we can do it is to and we're fighting, we're dealing with this right now is to go with Big Brother. And that is difficult for us because we want people and it makes sense from a retail. We want them to buy from us at full retail. We don't want anybody to take a cut. That's a different thing. That's part of it. We want them not to go with Big Brother who's taking over everything. But like I said, I deem a book a success when it sells 250 copies. I'm not saying after that it's all gravy because some of these books want to do more and deserve to do more and you wish you could know what to do to have them do more. And I'd say we're redeveloping our e-blast list and trying to have it be look more professional and having people opt into it. It takes time to rebuild a list that was just all my friends and emails back in the day. Now it wants to be we want to gradually build a almost like a subscriber list. We haven't talked about what we might do to have people look forward. I always imagine levelers finally to be where people would look forward to your next title and want to get it. But don't you also want to attract the authors that you're interested in publishing and so going back to that small town feel, is that fair? You know if you were distributing more and more books per year does that take away from what authors are looking for and why they're attracted to you or do you think not? I would say not on the scale we're talking about when you talk to like in you know 2000 is really not that big of a run. That's a small run in our world. That's kind of the regular run for small publishers. Yeah so if we're talking about the difference between us selling 250 and 2000 we're gonna want to you know sell more if we can. But yeah I think everyone has a different every author walking through the door has a different number in their head in terms of what they're already thinking in terms of their network. Some people come in and they want to have a perfect book ready for Christmas for their whole extended family. They want 45 copies or something like that and then some people come in and they're like I have a mailing list of 1500 people and like let's go with this number. So I think I don't think that the way we're talking about scaling detracts from any of like the small the small feel of what we're doing when you're back there in the bindery it's all kind of once you reach a certain quantity it's all kind of the same work it's all the same right when you agree the only the only difference I feel like it's where do we put the books? It's like a big thing like storing 2000 books is different from storing 200 books. I mean until we go out to offset this is back because this just really happened this it's brand new discussion right so and this is for people through the off the common through the off the common where they own the books where everything is a bill to them they're the publisher we assist them in that we'll get it right. If they commit to a thousand books we can print them as long as we keep them in stock they can be virtual they you know they the collapse of the wage function it becomes a book as opposed to storing boxes and boxes and books as long as as they commit to that count and the other thing it does sometimes they can and this happens a lot they can change that typo on page 150. That's true yes I could see the benefit to that sure sure it's it actually I get I get a kick out of doing that you know and and having because usually oh gosh we can we can do that thanks for the technology do you feel like you've talked a lot about your new ideas and plans and do you think if you had to guess right now do you think you'll outgrow this space? No okay we um no I mean I don't want to I I'll answer first you can I don't want to outgrow this space because one of the things we're committed to turns out we're committed to is Amherst you know and I was talking to this about a coat right having Amherst as being where we're from Amherst has its own panache you know it's a great place to have a publishing company be from if you're going to be in a small place there's hardly a better right to have it be from so that's fantastic to be on the common you know this is not a cheap space you know what I mean yes and but so outgrow and there's a fair amount of space okay right I would imagine us having if we ever really grew beyond we would have an additional space we have a shop in Florence which is another space to to distribute books and all that but it would be a while before we outgrow this space if we ever did okay okay and and I think you would almost go into offset you would have an offset component and I don't it won't be on my watch it won't be on my watch I'm never going back to offset ever yeah yeah it's a different culture too right oh yeah it's so it's so compartmentalized press operators are up against the binary workers and they're up against the film people play people there's no crossover fascinating well um except except in worker co-ops where there's other worker co-ops that are offset presses red sun presses the sister shops i'll say they're pressing Chicago their sister shops with us yeah and they have this kind of being able to move between departments as part of their well one of the things you all said you would do is show us what you do back there oh are you going to walk with your steady can yes all right so we'll give you a little tour of what the levelers off the common binder is you can see all the book covers up here that we've worked on which we need to update it because we probably have another 30 beyond this but this is where they typically happen one of the books one of those early books that we were very proud of is Paradise Printed and Bound it's the story of printing in Northampton which was part of that early thing early books that we printed our folks in Florence lay this out they brought it over here the digital files came here so i i laid it out and printed it and got it ready and now i'll not move too fast i'll move slowly so you can going off to our new little cutter which i'm so proud of all through my printing career i bought used equipment because new equipment was so expensive but uh people finally convinced me that rather than trying to repair old equipment all right occasionally if it's not too expensive you want to get a new piece of equipment so this is a nice digital cutter i kind of made this book everything so it would lay out well you know straight eight and half eleven format this is the guillotine this is awesome this is a guillotine you can see why it's called a guillotine right so there you go so we cut this we printed this two up and one of the great things about these machines so on page five of this there's one picture in color right and so we have our book block here and this this is you know again i don't know how how you get into fast production on this but this is our scoring machine and it puts two crimps it puts two crimps in the cover like that okay and so because we're waiting for our perfect binder to to warm up i'll show you here's our here's our paper down here i'm going to throw a little more in and um yeah papers that come already pre-cut to size this is that size i was telling you about 1319 we also get big mill sheets oversized but one this size more or less yeah and then cut them i'm coming around so most of our books we run four up four two sheet and that's about sheet size all right so we're we're going to uh we're going to this machine's waking up i forget that's from some kid's show you know it's like pwee's pwee's playhouse so this this i think if we can figure out some way to convey it is part of the beauty of everything that's going from this computer i talk to all of our machines so and we name all our machines this one that i'm printing to you now is called shadow fax okay and here's the job that i'm going to print for you so i i was making up some sheets that i had to repair but now i'm going to print a whole set and it's all programmed uh size wise uh whether it's color black and white where i'm going to tell it to deliver to the image quality all this kind of stuff is done from here and i just hit print and it's all in register and it goes there and i can move that job to bob the server if that i want to bob bob is our other one and uh snoopy is our newest machine so um it gives you a lot of flexibility it was a reason in a way to go with one company zero this is basically a xerox kind of setup and we've been with the same company for 15 years now or more um so that's good so it's it's it's processing again but once it's there it'll move right along and this is where uh we are for showing you this is the layout of a four-up book these are you know this is the the customer from california by the way one of the wonderful things that's happened ups and even the postal service we could compete to you know new york next day ups ground gets to new york city the next day so we do a lot of work in new york and this fellow is a great these are all these kind of uh really smart new urban designers uh from from uh california and so we're doing their book and they because we turn their books around so well they they tend to think we can do it all the time that's great so this book came in yesterday it has to be in san francisco on wednesday next week no kidding so my goal is to ship it today so it gets there without it being like overnight and so how many copies we're just printing sixteen now for him to take to uh norway with him no kidding that's really you know it's just like yeah our customers do exciting things a lot of our customers do really exciting so that's their job and how does that make you feel to know that your outreach is worldwide again to be from in this little town you know a very special little town a very special little town i agree one of the things you're you're always wanting to check is how your your job lines up here oh okay okay um i didn't go full tilt i could move this over a smidge but it's you know what i mean well that's incredible that you can hide that and just know yeah so you know in that where i was over there i can just move that over okay just move that yeah we're making adjustments at like every step of the way and here's the here's what it can do for photographs it's gorgeous yeah that big sheet like i said coming off helps us do what we're doing how are we doing over here this it's doing this is a self testing mode and it's getting the glue stir you see the see the glue getting stirred in there it goes back and forth it wants the glue to be nice so it's ready now so i just open up the clamp see i would love to have more kids coming through to show them this i love it you know it's just another thing we could do yeah fun check because it's almost like you might get them early get them into books early yes making books i was gonna say i know a children's librarian that would be able to hook y'all up yeah the problem is how many different things can you do you know it's still being what you're normally doing all right so now i'm hitting the start button and what you're going to hear is that sound or this wheel down here and it'll do it when it comes back again it's waiting for the cover now it's not changing it's not changing the book i think i'll stop it and show it to you just for y'all to say okay so what that just did was to rough up the spine you see that that's where so the glue goes in there okay okay um and that makes that makes it that perfect by perfect conversation but i don't know i can imagine a perfect calling this a perfect line all right so now i'm just getting this in position by getting that the scores we made lined up just where it wants to be for the book so you have to do that all by hand every single title every single book yep yep that's why they cost something we charge for our later that's good once you go beyond six by nine really or six and a quarter by nine and a quarter it might as well be eight and a half eleven for what it's going to cost you because we can then only print two up as opposed to four up you know what i mean so if you want your if you're close to a six by nine book don't go to six and a half or six and three quarters but i'm sorry or talk to me i'm the one who's got a name for myself already for designing weird size books and so do but do some people come in and actually want a bigger book i yeah and we do that we can still compete because they know it's going to cost okay okay yeah so it's fine so i'm just going to trim it down yeah usually we've got a nice we've got a nice laser light one of the things i like about this cutter is that it tells you right where it's going to cut so i'm going to i know where that's going to land you're making it look easy but i think um the things i'm going to do which i should have thought of there because i'm not cutting it with any slip sheets is to change this cutting stick see how it gets worn after cuts and cuts if you want to keep your your final sheet on the stack of paper you're cutting nice you would do that how often do you have to change the blade um you should we change this we change blades about once every three weeks out there out there where we cut more back here not so much not quite as much so maybe once every two months on this machine trying to standardize our practices so one thing i can do is after i've cut off see i've just cut off all the crop marks right but i can eyeball an eight right we're trying to make standard bleed as an eighth of an inch border okay i should do it the proper way you're always cutting to have the blade come into the spine of the book to have the least amount of nick on the book okay and it doesn't wiggle around no that's what that's what this clamp is doing so i'm bringing it down to a final size of 10 inches here's our book you watched it from start to finish that is so much fun most people have never seen anything like this it's an honor for me thank you for walking me through all this here you go that's for you guys that's so cool i love this yeah so before we say goodbye i actually um have something that i want to kind of brag about i want to take the opportunity to invite viewers to attend this year's samuel minot jones awards for literary achievement it's the jones library's annual um literary gala and uh this year steve will be accepting on behalf of levelers press and anna too and anna thank you you're welcome that's awesome uh the 2020 sammy for significant contribution to emmer's literary culture and it will take the event will take place on april 30th which is a thursday over emmer's college and we are really looking forward to having you yeah it'll be fun this has been so much fun thank you so much you're welcome thank you you rock