A top note: Tomorrow (December 13th!) is the last day for orders from the Riso Bookstore to ship before January — and holiday orders come with a beautiful “Peace on Earth” card by our friends Zine Hug.
In case you’re needing some gift-guide inspiration, here are a few print/creativity related holiday present ideas from cool people we know:
A 2025 subscription to the Floral Observer. The first issue arrives in the spring, and you could also add a copy of one of the back issues or a print. (I have an essay/ PCT hiking diary in the fall 2024 issue that just came out.)
A botanical / nature print from swan meadow, lovely riso people who we just met in St. Louis. I really like this one.
A print from Lucky Risograph — I particularly admired their Working Hours and "i love you" without saying it when we got to hang out at Short Run this fall.
The beautiful small book Wayfinder, the large colorful “Year of the Snack” calendar, and/or this riso manifesto tote from the bears at Bear Bear.
Futuro or Ya No Quiero Ser Fuerte, two brilliantly colored and funny-sad-cute comics published by our CDMX pals S.A.R.A. for the existential creative.
Zine Hug’s Color Chart Vol. 3 has all the cute characters drawn in all their risograph ink colors.
And here are a few ideas from us: Taking Care of Yourself as an Artist Publisher and Notes on Artist Publishing pair perfectly together. For people who like to see the entire year at a glance, there are just a few copies of Long Calendar 2025 left! The RISO West Coast catalog, for friends looking for places to print, take workshops, buy art, and otherwise participate in the west coast land of risograph. And Getting Started with Making Electronic Music or How To Pizza Night could also be good gifts for music or cooking friends!
For the person who wants to sew in your life: a copy of the book I co-wrote, How to Sew Clothes, which is on a big sale on the bad store right now (only $22!) as well as being available in most other bookstores. My co-author Amy just texted a me a screenshot of this review:
You can also browse all our PDF sewing patterns on the All Well site and on Etsy. Related: I also enjoyed reading Things I like: Sewing aspirations edition!
Adam and I are in St. Louis spending time with family, and last weekend we wandered the excellent Cherokee St. Print Bazaar and bought art for holiday gift giving. We got to see risograph art from swan meadow, Sarah Wang, PSA STL and Melon Press. Hopefully in some future year, we can time a St. Louis visit to coincide with the comics and small press expo SLICE.
I’ve been working on an interior design project: helping furnish an apartment using almost entirely free and/or secondhand furniture, plus a trip to IKEA for things that are tricky to find used. I love the creative process of designing spaces and thinking how they are used, how things flow, what is beautiful and useful. What do people need at different times of day, for different activities? How is the light? It’s making me want to re-read the old Apartment Therapy: The Eight-Step Home Cure book with the oh-so-2008 orange-painted walls on the cover. Softness! Light! Flow! (Actually, that book could be a good creative gift for a person in your life who is wanting to work on their home design a bit! Used copies abound, for $5-ish.)
Adam has been deep in Spectrolite code, making all the developer tests run much, much faster, which will help us with making and testing the app — plus some things that will make it faster to use for color separation and other common tasks. We’ve been doing the budget for 2025 for life and business. Planning out spending is a creative/fun project IMO; it’s always interesting to think ahead for the year and figure out what’s coming and make tradeoffs and reflect on what worked last year, what we want more or less of.
We’re also plotting the trips coming up in the next few months, as we near the end of our current big travel adventure. We’re going on a MIDWEST ROAD TRIP in January-early February, to visit friends and see some cities we haven’t spent time in. We’re in the early planning stages: if anyone in Chicago / Milwaukee / Detroit and thereabouts wants to meet up for coffee/tea or a studio visit, or go on walk or bike ride in your favorite neighborhood / park / museum, please hit reply and send us an email! We’d love to meet some fellow artists / small press people / sewists / bike riders / walkers etc.
I love posts that go into the numbers of making publications, like these two: Why We Are Self Publishing the Aviary Cookbook and The (surprising) economics of cookbook publishing. Also publishing related, here is Anne Trubek with some logistics notes relevant to self publishing:
Many American paper mills have switched to cardboard (hello online shopping) and thus there is a chronic paper shortage. Some stocks—some weights or colors of paper—are increasingly hard to find. A publisher might have to change the plans they had for a book—move from 60 pound paper to 50, say—because the printer didn’t have enough 60 pound paper to do a print run. You might be buying books on very flimsy paper because there simply wasn’t enough of the sturdier stuff.
Paper cost has increased 50% or so over the past five years. That sturdier stuff costs a lot more than it used to. This is a major reason why many publishers are raising their prices (readers seem to me much more understanding about this economic reality when it comes to restaurant prices than they are about book prices). Publishers might choose lighter paper to prevent raising the price of a book, or to lower unit cost.
Some other collected links from the past month:
the subprime AI crisis — (FWIW, I think the current wave of generative AI is a variation on the same old VC pump-and-dump scheme that gave us crypto, NFTs, the “metaverse”, AR, VR, and web3. That it is not actually useful, it’s not something there’s demand for, and of course that’s even before we talk about AI’s atrocious energy use, carbon emissions, leading to climate disaster, etc. Also the current AI focus in tech companies might cause a stock market crash.)
Author Lauren Groff on allowing for time and space to create (different spaces for different projects!)
Hope you’re hanging in there. I’ve been reading dark books, including Nuclear War: A Scenario (whew) the first three books of Game of Thrones series (??) and am about to join Rachel Hays in a re-read of The Left Hand of Darkness. Drinking a lot of rooibos chai (the powder one from blue lotus) and taking a lot of IRL hot/warm yoga classes. And we’ve been making that creamy tortellini soup recipe that’s going around.
— Amelia