Errant Dispatch

Tomorrow Rebel Press will finally get its own printer — a beautiful A3 black and white printer on an über-cheap service plan (1.9 cents a page, all expenses and servicing included). From this point on, we’ll be able to make books virtually in-house (minus covers) — we can do printing, binding, and guillotining with our own equipment for less than $6 a book plus overheads.

Since the end of last year, our little collective has grown from being mainly just myself to five of us, housed in a little office we’ve got going for cheap. In getting started, our main source of money has come from sales of Val’s book — Against Freedom — which (sadly, but predictably) sold particularly well after she was arrested along with 16 others as part of the October 15th terrorism raids.

Our aim as a collective is to print and publish anarchist or radical material from our region in the South Pacific, and we’ve got a couple of projects underway — the most pressing being the upcoming issue 9 of imminent rebellion. This will for the first time be more like a journal, much longer and in depth than before, and hopefully we can get it into mainstream/idependent bookstores as well as to the usual anarchist points of distribution.

At the moment, we’re binding everything by hand which we’re getting much better at and which I find incredibly satisfying, superseded only by the feel of pulling down the lever of the guillotine to trim the books. (I might put up a how-to guide on binding, at some point).

In using a digital process, and hand-binding the books, we can do very short-run books, and so long as we don’t have enough projects underway to keep busy we may start doing collected readers, or reprints of classics for cheap (along the lines of the Penguin ‘Great Ideas’ series). I reckon if people have ideas for readers or themed anthologies, and are keen to gather together some texts, we’d probably be quite keen to publish them (hint hint).

www.rebelpress.org.nz