 Thank you all. This is a treat. Thank you APHA, the other APHA. I also remember the American Public Health Association. And thank you San Francisco Public Library. You all are doing God's work in this place. So thank you. And the IATSEE crew doing the filming. So this is a little bit of an experiment. I usually talk about posters. But in my work on posters, I backed into looking at more than just the posters. So let's get rolling on this. It's a school night. This is the portion of a Cuban poster. And I got it up here because a lot of good graphic art relies on the concept of positive and negative space. This is an American imperial eagle being downed by the forces of good. And it's just a wonderful example of a very compact image that shows how you can really compress positive and negative into a meaningful montage. This is also meaningful. This is what's going on at the Albany Public Library where there's serious weeding of books. Some would say extremely so. And sort of often you learn what's missing is just as important as what's there. So what we're going to talk about is a field of study that is relatively marginalized even by printing historians. We're talking about quick printing. We're talking about the evolution of modern technology in the late 50s and early 60s that allowed for a very democratic transformation in what printing meant. It allowed for people to actually own equipment that they wouldn't be able to do before at a big shop. People with less skill were able to learn and print themselves. And what this meant in the emergence of the movements of the 60s was all of a sudden a brand new channel for propaganda was emerging. And it wasn't just through happenstance. It was necessary. This is a great, this is a caption from a poster to women, an older woman and a younger woman running against that machine. That's what this is about. This is a fundamental transformation in media. I recently ran across this. It's an obituary. There was a wonderful testimonial to this woman. She went out to buy a car and it said came home with a used offset press. He taught her how to use it and this woman was turning out leaflets and that's what she became known for. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. They were doing work. People needed leaflets. Leaflets were the main channel. We didn't have the web. We didn't know radio stations. We didn't know television. We certainly didn't know the New York Times. We had underground newspapers. But how do you get the word out about things? You print them on flyers. You make posters. You make booklets. This was how the movement happened. This was the transformation of the medium. So this woman would stay up all night with her child feeding paper. So here's an example. This is from 1966. This would have been a hard thing for a lesbian to walk into a straight print shop and say I'd like you to make me 500 of these. The printing trade was pretty conservative in the 50s. It's actually pretty conservative now. And I think that this would have been a hard thing to get done. So what do you do? You acquire the means of production yourself. Well, this wouldn't have been as easy to do until the evolution of new equipment that was coming out that was post-war equipment that was cheaper, easier to use, and it required less skill. So documents like this, like this, these are all things. Many of these are in the Special Collection here at this library. They're certainly part of our history. These were the tracks that fed the minds and changed the minds of a whole generation of people. These were produced not on high-end equipment with trained people. This was done by summer professionals on used equipment, and this was quick printing. But before quick printing, we had gift setters and mimeographs. A lot of the reason this stuff is marginalized even by printing historians is because it's not craft. It's not art. It's propaganda. And, yeah, it is just propaganda, but propaganda plays an important role. Benjamin Franklin would have agreed. You know, you need to get the message out. It may be a little bit funky, but you've got to get documents in the hands of the people if you're going to have democracy. And so this was a really good start. This was something that almost every church had, every union or hall had. This was the beginning of people being able to produce their own stuff easily. So, Gestetner machines, for those of you who don't know, it's essentially an elaborate sort of a stencil that mounts on a drum. And one of the great things about Gestetners was how you could make the stencils. You could put them on a typewriter and type them. They also had scanners. These were the first commercially available inexpensive drum scanners where you could put an original and it would burn, literally burn, a master that you could then put on a machine. So you could scan pre-existing art. You could scan photographs. And when they made this stuff, they didn't quite know. This was supposed to be for just cranking out simple flyers. But people said, wow, look at this new equipment. This was the 60s. They did things with this equipment that nobody ever thought you could do. So the Bay Area pioneered the communication company, which was the Diggers. This was their medium. They were cranking out stuff and they were having a lot of fun with it. So here's some of their stuff. You know, here's, oh my God, dope, planted books throughout San Francisco libraries. Have you guys checked the stacks? This was getting the word out. This was the people's medium. We need all the help we can get, by the way. Well, here we have, you know, Richard Brodigan poem. Nice two-color piece. The Summer of Love. You know, these were produced at the moment, but these are two colors. These are actually implementing a certain artistic sensibility to this. This wasn't just slapping words on paper. They put some effort into this. Fast forward another 10 years. Jane Norling, raise your hand. She's in the room. So here's that burner I was telling you about. This is how you could take an original piece of art, you get transferred lettering, you make your art in different ways, you burn a stencil, and then you put it on the machine. And so this wasn't a big expensive print shop. This was, you know, a small room where people were turning out really amazing material. And when I'm saying amazing material, I'm talking some pretty good stuff here. We're talking essentially full-color work done one color at a time on a Gestet machine. Amazing work. And not all of them look this good. Some of them were a little bit off-register, but it worked pretty well and it got the idea out. And this was getting it out, even slightly imperfectly, was more important than getting it perfect and helping that it gets into a museum or something. This was helping to change people's minds. Now we've got the basic here. We've got ABDIC 360 and the Multilith 1250. There wasn't a single political print shop in the country in the 60s that didn't have one of these cranking out stuff. These were the bread and butter of printing for community organizations back then. These were simple to maintain. They were self-contained. You could plug it into the wall. Didn't take 220. These have chain deliveries, which is nice. If you notice at this end of it, there's actually a stacker that lowers the paper. So you could have, you know, thousands of sheets of paper, whereas the simpler ones just sort of drop into a chute. But chain delivery was sort of the Cadillac end of these, where you could actually load in 2,000 sheets of paper and get 2,000 sheets out. Nicely stacked and jogged. I'm the archivist for Kaiser Permanente and I pulled some stuff from our own archives here. This is Kaiser Graphic Arts 1968. You're looking at some of that cutting-edge technology. She's had a composing selectric, which was able to do justified columns of type. You look in the back there on the right-hand side. There's a headline maker, a verityper, that you have these discs. They each have a font for a particular size. In the back of the machine, you have a chemical processor for the strip of paper. So it's all one device that would make a strip of headline. It comes out dry. You wax it. That thing next to it there is a waxing machine for paste-up. You wax the back of whatever you're doing. You shoot it. This was how you made stuff, and this was all just in one small room. Here's the process. You've got your multilit there. Bishop on the right there, he's doing paste-up. This is how commercial industries were doing stuff as well, but people were doing this as well. So here, you've got Bishop over there. His friend across town was Richard here. He's sitting there with a Navy Dick in this warehouse in Emeryville with a shotgun and his bell-bottom pants and his fro because we're printing stuff with a movement. He was a poet. He said, I want to make poetry. It's expensive to go to a print shop. I want to do it myself. I can do it myself. Poets, people doing political work, all sorts of folks were taking up printing as a way of communication and expression. This is a photo by Harold Adler who's taken a lot of photographs in Berkeley. Wonderful stuff. There's a folder back there, but you can see it just didn't take much equipment to do this stuff. Part of what I'm trying to do is get the stories of the people that ran these because when I say this is a marginalized subject, I really mean it. There's no book on the history of political printing in the United States, and so I'm interviewing these people, talking to them, getting their stories. Some of their stories are pretty wild. I said, well, how did you get the press? Well, it was a hot press. We drove to Sacramento to pick it up. A policeman happened to be walking by and he helped us to roll it into the truck. You can't make this stuff up. These are great stories, and this is real underground printing. They made all sorts of poetry, political stuff, and one thing to understand is that in the 60s, the counterculture and the political movements were very few. It's not like, oh, the poets and artists were over there and the people doing political work were over here. People were all sleeping with each other and hanging out with each other and working with each other and supporting each other. And you see, they very often have people that would do stuff for both. Another thing about printing is everybody needs printing. So if you've got a print shop, all of a sudden people come to your door and say, hey, we need this flyer for this dance. We're doing a benefit concert. We're doing a poetry book. So all of a sudden you're helping to build community. And one nice thing about working, I was an estimator at Anchor's for years. I know half the people in town from coming across the counter with jobs. There's a whole community value in having a print shop that's a community-based shop. Who knows what this is? It's blotter acid. How do you think blotter acid got printed? Some of these shops were doing illegal work to raise money. You make illegal concert tickets that you sell. There's a lot of ways these shops made money that were a little bit off the books. So some of these shops, here's people's press. Great graphic. This is the modern version of the tyrants' foe that people's friend. These were shops that were deliberately out there to serve the communities. Here's Jane, again, moved up from the Gestet machine to a press. One thing that you learn, and as you talk to these people, and I know it from my own experience, almost none of these people went to trade school. They learned just by doing it. I mean, every shop had an old copy of the Navy manual for printing. This was like the Bible for how to learn how to print. But you try it. How bad can it be? You try it, you screw up. It's really hard to hurt the equipment, and the worst is you have something that looks terrible. You do it again, and pretty soon you pick it up. I know a handful of people actually went to trade schools and learned how to do this stuff. Everybody else did it because they wanted to be a propagandist, and that's how they did it. You just went to a shop, you started hanging out, you did it. Here's Betty Harris, who was setting up the Black Panther Party print shop. Everybody had their own shop. Some of them had different equipment, but they all got it. Often it was donated, it was in bad shape, it needed to be rebuilt. You talk to somebody else who's got another shop. You slowly build up the connections. All the printers knew each other. You knew who was doing this kind of stuff. If your press was down, you needed to go to someplace else to get it done. It was a very collegial relationship. This is a great picture of him running this press. The Black Panther Party needed printing. Now this was not printing the newspaper. You all know that there's web presses, which are really big that run giant rolls of paper. When people talk about underground presses, like the Berkeley barb, those were printed on web presses. Well, we didn't own those presses. There were straight shops. Sometimes they were sympathetic shops. One thing that you find is that very often there's this whole arc. There's a movement shop that's entirely owned by people that do political work. Then there's a sympathetic shop that's run by Uncle Harry. You can go in there at night and sure, they'll run that thing for you. Some shops were very sympathetic. Sometimes people work in a shop and do it without the boss's permission. There was a whole range of how these things got printed. All of a sudden, that night shift was turning out all sorts of stuff that the employer had. No idea what was going on. That was a common practice. He started using some beautiful drawings of presses. I love illustrating presses. This is by Juan Fuentes. It's a fundraiser for the San Francisco printing co-op. $2 back in the day. These shops were really good. They were also models for working together. Very few of these shops were just run by one person. Usually with several people. The more successful ones had a crew. You start getting some specialization. Somebody does camera work, somebody runs the press, somebody does boundary. Sometimes you rotate around, but sometimes it didn't work because it really does require some skill. How do you build a shop that's sustainable? How do you do division of labor? How do you pay people? How do you deal with the trades? I worked at Inquix for a long time and we were a union show. We had what we called an internal contract. If we were paying people according to what the union said we had to pay, we'd have a giant range of pay scales. We just level that out. We paid everybody the same rate. Senior press operator or somebody who's been there six months doing camera work was getting paid the same rate. We averaged it out because that was our political choice about running a collective. But as far as the union was concerned we were paying people union scale. So there's different ways of handling this stuff, but you learn how to work together. And so these were really important skills as part of building an alternative society. Also how do you work with clients? How do you have sliding scales? Some clients can afford to pay more than others. This is not just a standard business model. These were skills that we needed to make these shops self-sustaining and to serve the movement. The shops that burned out really quickly were the ones that said, oh, we'll do that for free. Well, that's a nice idea, but how do you pay for paper? How do you pay for ink? And so you had to build a business model and it was flexible. It was political, but still you had to figure out some way to pay for it because these were not supported by grants and donations. These were supported by people paying for stuff. Often people would volunteer their time, but that also wasn't very sustainable either. So one thing you're trying to do is you're trying to work with other similar trades. People were doing, in the old days, you had typographers out there doing the type. You had bindery. You had things that were outside of your shop. Well, how do you, to what extent do you bring this together under one roof to make it more efficient? To what extent do you just leave that separately and you work on it? I just got this recently. This was a booklet that they had done about teaching women how to do layout because back in the day if you wanted to walk into a shop to get it printed, it had to be camera ready. And so there were skills about doing that in a way that looked good and would work. So the women's press project was really great. Again, you saw the Black Panther Party print shop. Well, the women's press said, you know, we need to bring women into the trade. This is an area where women have traditionally been excluded and this is how we can start getting them in. We can teach them the skills. We can have them running equipment. This is a really important project. So there's a little bit about them. They were on Otis Street, right? What they were doing was really, really important because the women, you know, this was a way that they could get into the trade. So this was an important backdoor for them to learn the skills and to be doing political work at the same time. Some of these shops were great. This was up at Berkeley. This was one of the shops. It was specifically a political shop, but it had political sensibilities. So again, on that spectrum, it wasn't inkworks, but it was, they had people working there that were doing good stuff. You get some great graphics. You got the lithographers and pressmen's international union there, bug, but you have this great rainbow Zenith logo. Here's some more bugs. This is recent, Newworth Press. Now you see here the IWW. A lot of shops were IWW because it was a lot easier to join to become an IWW shop than it was to join the trades. The trades were pretty straight. You could just sign up with the IWW and the Industrial Union 450. The difference with the IWW bugs is every print shop is IU 450. That's sort of their niche in the industrial pie. So you can't tell simply by that number that, oh, what shop that is. Whereas a lot of the union bugs, you know, the allied bugs and so forth, you can actually tell which print shop made that by the number that's on it. So invariably, the IWW shops also have the name of it. So, you know, this was in Berkeley, Newworth Press. They were right across from the Ashby Bart. No directions press. That one that I showed you earlier with the fellow with the shotgun. You know, a goofy, sweet IWW bug in this sort of split fountain graphic here. Here's some of Equorix bugs. And so as a cataloger, I really appreciate the fact that you can start to learn a little bit about the history of a shop simply by its evolution of bugs. So again, this is part of the cataloger's nightmare. A lot of the stuff that was produced in the 60s and 70s was anonymously produced in terms of artists. It was bourgeois to put your name on something. And very often there wasn't a year. Come to the rally Saturday. So I want the catalog record to reflect its historical evolution. So part of what I'm doing is I'm putting years on things. Well, the bugs help us to do that. This is the A.B. Dick that I used to run. This is Beth Tapscott who succeeded me at Equorix. That was my workstation. So this was how we did stuff. This was women in the trades. Equorix was a really is a really important shop. I mean, we had a lot of people in there. A lot of people had come through for just a few years. Some people stuck around forever like Howie. But it's a really important shop that there's three shops in the country that are political print shops from the 70s that are still around. There's Salcedo in Chicago, which is the first. There's Red Sun Press in just in the Boston area. And there's Anquorix. These are shops that started in the 70s. And they were smart enough to come up with a way to do it because printing serves a valuable function. People need printing. Straight people need printing. It's a movement. And even the movement needs to pay for printing somewhere. So it actually has a way to make money and do political work. There's not a lot of times that you can combine those two. And that's one reason that shops like those are still around. Other reasons are Anquorix is a worker-owned business which gives us some flexibility during downtime. So instead of the normal business model where, oh, we're going to have to let some people go, we don't really let people go. We voluntarily take less money, but it gives you some flexibility that a standard business might not. We also had a political point of unity. This is why we do what we do. And there were sometimes, a job would walk in, we'd say, no, we don't want to do that. That's not what we do. We had the authority to say, I'm sorry, we're here for a certain kind of printing. This is Steve Long. He used to be in the Black Panther Party. We hired him at the shop. Here he is running the Pearl. But we used everything we could. That's Howie in the background there. There's Howie. That was the course, right? So we started, that was like, oh, the flagship Heidelberg. We've been very strong supporters of Heidelberg. We've given them lots of money over the years. And their presses are good. Also, I think their financing was really good too, as I recall. But we also keep investing in new equipment. I keep saying, I haven't been with the shop in 10 years. But I feel very much a part of it because it's an important part of Bay Area history and of political printing history. This is a digital press. This is a two-unit. It accepts digital files, makes the plates on the press. This is hugely modern technology. I remember when I was running the student print co-op at UC San Diego in the mid-70s, we had a really modern device. It was made by 3M. It was an MR412 automatic plate maker. It was this giant machine with a camera at one end and a processor, and you put your original artwork in and the lights would hit. Processors would crank out a disposable plastic plate that you could just put right on the press. It was incredibly efficient, very cost-effective. We didn't need a darkroom. We didn't need metal plates. It was a really, really amazing system. So this technology keeps changing, but quick printing shouldn't be relegated to the dustbin of printing history. It really fills an important niche. If nothing else, I want you all to go away with that. Here's some of the graphics and logos from the various shops. And then you start to go into sort of, well, like I said, some people would do stuff on the side. And so I love this credit here. People would just work at a print shop one night and all of a sudden, hmm, gee, there's 500 sheets of paper missing. I can't explain it. Red Dragon. Now talk about underground printing. I mean, this is the people that were the Weather Underground. They were really underground. I mean, they built rooms within rooms in apartments so that you'd mute the sound. When you dispose of plates, you couldn't just put them in the trash can. You'd have to go across town to get rid of it in different dumpsters. You really had to be careful. When they hand-assemble documents, they use gloves because they didn't even have to be used. Another thing you start to get into is, well, what about copyright? What role did the various shops and producers at the time do? Because, well, this was the movement. And generally, within the movement, you could share easily. There wasn't the same sense as there was now of, oh, that's mine and I'm going to copyright it. If it was within the movement, it was pretty much okay just to run with it and use it. If you gave credit, that was nice. Literally, how do you describe protection of the document? So it turns out that publication of devs, it's essentially the same thing. Copyright protection is taken upon this volume for the sole purpose of protecting the work of comrade devs from prejudice misuse by pirate capitalist publishers and will not be invoked against socialist and labor publications and comrade publishers, they're giving us notice. There's a collegiality about this whole movement that was really important and it made us feel like we were part of community and we were. So I'm going to end a little bit here with, I'm mostly talking about offset shops and they played a very important role and a lot of the posters that I deal with in the archives of the Bay Area and Outsworth were done offset in bigger shops. And of course, the bigger the press, the bigger the poster and the 11 by 17 inches is sort of my cutoff for what I consider a poster. But bigger than that, you start to get great stuff and so Inkworks has done some fantastic, and that's how we did this book. You know, just the volume of posters over the years that were done are staggering and it's a testament to the history of our movement and to the artists of our movement. But it's also a testament to the printers that nobody talks about the printers about the underground press and they talk about the artists. They really also need to start looking at well, where was that made? Which print shop did it? Because that's really part of our part of our history here. You know, some of the screen print shops occasionally you'd have some bleed through it. This was La Rossa Graphics which they mostly were screen printing but this was one of the rare opportunities to see something where you've got screen printing and offset at the same time this is from a film that a friend of my shot at Worcester Hall at UC Berkeley in 1970 when students took over the College of Environmental Design they set up phone banks and they set up mini-a-graphs and they set up screen printing and there's whole hallways that were used to dry stuff and these were produced in additions of thousands huge amounts of hand labor cranking out local posters about the war, about police brutality, this was the people's medium and so this is an example of screen printing which is sort of a parallel track to the history of offset printing but the role of offset printing in creating this whole new channel for political work has not really been credited properly and so I want y'all to be thinking about that and to sort of ask around and sometimes you'll find somebody oh yeah, I used to work in a print shop and well what'd you do? How did you learn that? So this is a book that I recently did when I put this book together I very methodically listed the various shops and even gave sort of thumbnail descriptions of them in the Bay Area I've got this online now so if you just search for political print shops Bay Area you'll get this and I'm expanding it and I really want to do this for the rest of the country there's places that you wouldn't expect that had really important you know the bigger cities you'd expect but some places like New York didn't have a political print shop well how come? I mean it's a big mystery there New York never had anything like encorques they had sort of a counter cultural shop they did some stuff but the Communist Party had a big shop outside of town but there was never any sort of grassroots community based political print shop in Manhattan that was serving the broader community why? why yes Chicago why Boston why not Manhattan there's a lot of questions here we're just beginning this research but I think it's fascinating stuff and again it all requires people coming forward with stories looking at the bugs saying oh there's a shop I never heard of what's that all about starting to do the research so this is me this is what I do printed propaganda how they happen how they get used how they get recycled and how they end up in archives like the Special Collections here at the San Francisco Public Library so that they can be interpreted and reused again in whole new generations of propaganda for making this world a better place so thank you