Oregon Humanities

Book Publishing as Common Ground

Matthew Stadler and Patricia No’s Publication Studio makes books while you wait.

Caroline Cummins

Mid-morning on a typical rainy Portland day, Matthew Stadler is trying to publish a book. It’s a novel—Stacey Levine’s _The Girl with Brown Fur_—and Stadler is publishing it the way he does every morning, Monday through Saturday: with a laptop computer, a laser printer, manila folders, a glue binder, and a paper trimmer. Add a rubber stamp or two—for printing the title, the author, the ISBN—and he’s done.

But he’s having trouble this morning. First he puts the printed pages into the glue binder backward, so the book gets glued and bound back to front. “A typical day,” he sighs. After he gets it bound correctly, he gauges the measurements for the paper trimmer incorrectly and chops the book in half. The third time, though, is the charm, and Levine’s novel—austerely bound, in what Stadler calls a “jank edition”—is ready to go.

“Stacey’s about to get $5 for the book I’ve just printed,” Stadler says. “No traditional publisher would ever give her that, per book. We’re doing this as a way to see if money can move this thing properly.”

By “this thing,” Stadler means both his on-demand publishing endeavor, called Publication Studio (http://www.publicationstudio.biz), and the concept of book publishing in general. In September 2009, Stadler and cofounder Patricia No opened Publication Studio as a publishing experiment. Supported by the Ace Hotel, which donated the use of the studio’s first space at SW 10th Avenue and Stark Street in downtown Portland, the studio publishes only a few books—novels, photography, poems, conceptual art—at a time. “If you want a copy, you’d either stand here while I do it for you or come back in half an hour,” says Stadler.

Traditional book publishing, he says, is both wasteful—all those remaindered books, unsold and pulped—and isolating. “If you love literary culture, then you look for a way to make it be what you want it to be,” he says. “I wish that every book of mine got to every reader who wanted it, instead of lying around on a remainder table somewhere. Publication Studio is an effort to make publishing as nimble and quick as the conversation around publishing. We make a book when it’s exciting. Instead of waiting for a market to develop, we can try to create the market.”

“We make a book when it’s exciting,” Stadler says. “Instead of waiting for a market to develop, we can try to create the market.”

So while Publication Studio is open to the public six days a week, 6 a.m. to noon, Stadler and No spend the rest of their time trying to create conversation and community around books. The studio holds occasional children’s events, letting kids bind their own books, as well as the odd dinner-and-music fête, with literary personalities as the guests of honor. In December, the studio held a Publication Fair, inviting local independent publishers to convene, chat, and cash out on a few books. And the dialogue continues online, where readers can peruse Publication Studio’s books onscreen and make digital margin notes.

“How do you make a common space?” Stadler asks. “A book is common ground, but how do you enrich that common ground?”