Through his work on Sick: A Compilation Zine On Physical Illness and his interest in related issues, Ben has stayed true to ideals of justice and radicalism. Here’s an interview he conducted with Team Colors‘ Kevin Van Meter with Rock Dove Collective about their work to make healthcare available as widely and reasonably as possible!

Like any DIY project, we’re in near-constant financial peril. That’s nothing new. And we know that most folks who support Microcosm don’t have a ton of cash to spare, especially in the form of a straight-up donation. So, rather than passing the hat around, here’s a chance to remind you all of other ways to support Microcosm!

BFF Program

Like a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) share that gives farmers a guarantee before their crops are harvested, our BFF’s help us by paying upfront for their zines and books! Publishing our titles means we pay the printing costs before any books are sold, so every BFF gives us a little peace of mind. Plus, it’s awesome for people to get mailed something new every month of the subscription! Check out the BFF program here.

Sliding Scale Pricing

The standby of DIY venues and house shows, pay-what-you-can prices allow people to give within their means. We don’t know of any other publisher that does this, but Microcosm offers sliding scale prices for titles we produce! We try to put stuff out for cheap, so extra dollars go a long way to keep our pricing sustainable.

Getting the Word Out

The cheapest way to help us out is by telling folks about Microcosm and distributing catalogs. It’s also so important that we wouldn’t be here without it! Check out our Press page for more info about getting the word out.

Microcosm operates as a not-for-profit collectively-run organization. All money goes back into the organization and new publishing projects. We choose not to be a 501(c)3 organization because it would require outside management, which is a challenge to any radical organization. For more information on this, Incite! Women of Color Against Violence edited a book challenging the non-profit industrial complex in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, and resources are available on their website. This means that we don’t write grants or push tax-free contributions, so we instead keep things at the grassroots level. To find out more about how our money is spent, check out our 2009 and 2010 financial reports. We sincerely appreciate any help you all can throw down!

Questions about how we roll? Check out our recently overhauled FAQ or get in touch!

Next Stop Adventure author Matt Gauck is runnin’ a Kickstarter campaign to fund a bike trip to Alaska, which will be the basis for his next issue! We talked to Matt about all that and a bunch more. Check out Matt’s Kickstarter page right here.

Q: You’re Kickstartering a trip to Alaska/the next issue of your zine. Tell us how that works.

A: Well, I’ll be the first to admit it feels weird to kickstart something like this, but it came from joking with some friends about all the ridiculous things that might “work” as Kickstarter projects, and I submitted one – half for fun, and half because, if it DID work, it would be a great resource of names to actually get the zine to people that really wanted to read it. One of my main problems with zine writing is that I can’t bring myself to write if I don’t think it will be read by anyone, and there’s a sort of “built-in” readers list with Kickstarter. That, and I have this terrible feeling that in the next three years, kickstater is going to become “the norm” for means to start any creative project. I’m just making it work while it’s still new-ish. To be fair, if I had a means of “pre-selling” my zine, I would’ve just done that. Minus my own sizable distribution point, this is the next best option.

Q: For people who haven’t gotten a chance to read your zine, tell us about it…

A: It’s called Next Stop Adventure, and it’s basically a “good-natured, tongue-in-cheek, funny” travel zine, that typically centers on riding my bicycle for a really long distance. It’s a bike zine, for sure, but the stories are usually less about the biking, and more about the experiences that crossing a state at 18mph allows for. I’ve read a bunch of travel zines, and they never talked specifically about the stuff that I wanted to read, so I made a zine that did. Do you wash your clothes? What do you eat? What should a normal person expect when going on their first bike tour? I answer those questions with hilarious stories that end up with me on a rooftop, in a dumpster, or maybe even hiding in a covered slide at a Burger King. I aim for the first adjective used to describe the zine to be “inspiring.”

Q: How did you get into zine-makin’?

A: I used to draw for a bunch of punk zines in the North Carolina area back in high school (’96-’99) and that’s where self-publishing took its grip on me. As for writing my own, it wouldn’t happen until 2005, when I was back in school, and had just done a four-day bike trip across most of South Carolina, and the story was so funny that I was sick of emailing all my friends nearly-identical accounts of it. I decided it might have some kind of interested audience, so I made like 10 of them. I gave them all away, made a couple more, mailed those away to friends, and was all of the sudden getting a good response.

Q: What are some of the books/zines you’ve read lately?

A: I try to stagger my reading back and forth, usually “political then adventure.” I just finished You Can’t Win and I had been reading a Thor Heyerdahl book about crossing the Atlantic ocean on a raft made from reeds. Guerrilla USA is what I’m finishing up now – I got it from the library, it’s about the George Jackson Brigade, up in the NW back in ’70s. So crazy. Then I have a book on astral projection I’m really excited about. As for zines, I read one on UFOs the other day; One Way Ticket is always good, Bring on the Dancing Horses was great, I constantly re-read Big Hands, and I’ll leap on anything that’s traded to me. I finally finished Rod Coronado’s zines too, the Strong Hearts ones. Super good. OH and there’s a huge archive of impossible to find animal rights zines on some friends’ website conflictgypsy.com.

Q: What kind of zines would you say you gravitate towards?

A: I feel most compelled to read about bike touring ones, but they always fall short for me. I love reading about low-scale scams and crime stuff, and animal rights zines are always high on my list. On the other end, I can get into some comics occasionally, but usually just Ken Dahl’s stuff. I’m terrible at reading fiction. Non-fiction stories that sound like fiction are my favorite.

Q: Finally, if you had to get one zine’s title tattooed into your flesh what would it be?

A: HA! Well, as goofy as it sounds, I already have “next stop adventure” tattooed above my knees BUT if I was going beyond that one, I’d definitely say “Murder Can be Fun.” I wouldn’t get messed with when I’m camping on the side of the road.

We recently had an email chat with How & Why author Matte Resist about his new book, the definition of “work,” and building a DIY time machine!

Q: How did the book come about? What was the genesis of the thing?

A: The motivation of the book was Joe asking me if I’d like to do the follow up for Making Stuff and Doing Things, but really I’d been thinking about doing a DIY book for a long time. I’d written a lot of DIY plans for my zine (Resist), some of which were used in Making Stuff and Doing Things and I had started compiling other plans and ideas for a future book. Most of them centered around bicycle repair and modification. After How to Rock & Roll and Chainbreaker came out, I felt that the bicycle repair ground had been pretty well covered so a lot of the articles that I had actually written and illustrated were scrapped and I started writing about other projects I was doing. Some of the projects were things I wanted to do but hadn’t found time or motivation to do until I was writing a book.

Q: Have you had much feedback from people who’ve completed the projects?

A: I’ve gotten some feedback from the bike trailer plans which were included in Resist #46. All of it has been positive except for one person who said it was too heavy. Very little of the rest has seen print before now, at least not in its current form, so there’s been little time for feedback. I will say that since I’ve started writing about gardening that is by far the topic I receive the most questions about. I always try to share what I know but usually wish that I knew more and could offer more information.  I read a quote once that sums it up pretty well, something to the effect of “I’m a very old man, but a very young gardener.”  Taming nature is no easy task and even after a lifetime of trying there’s still a lot to learn! Mostly I’ve heard that the plans are easy to follow and that the illustrations usually answer any questions that come up, which is exactly what I was shooting for!

Q: If a really young kid—say 10 or 12—asked you to define the concept of DIY—your own personal version of it—in one sentence what would you say?

A: It’s about learning to do things for yourself instead of always buying everything you need from the store.

Q: If you built a time machine and went back to meet your great-great-great grandfather and he asked you to define “happiness” in one sentence what would you say?

A: I’d say, “Grandpa, you know as well as I that happiness is about loving and being loved.”

Q: If your first boss of your first-ever job asked you to define the word “work” in one sentence what would you say?

A: Then or now? (and what’s with all this once sentence crap? I’m a storyteller not a poet!) At 15 years old I probably would have said, “It’s a necessary evil.”  Now? Maybe I’d say, “It’s the act of being productive, and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with a job.”

Q: If an interstellar spaceship landed in your backyard and an alien climbed out and asked you to define your planet in one sentence what would you say?

A: It’s on the brink of a major upheaval which will either lead to total collapse or a resurgence of simple living.

Word Association Time!
1 Bike – ride
2 Tree – house
3 Punk – ethics
4 America – for sale
5 Publish- self

Q: Finally, do you have any new projects coming up?
A: Yes, I have two major upcoming projects but they’re both top secret! Other than those, I’m hoping to finish up some work on our basement.  I’ve been meaning to install a bathroom for a few years and I think I’m actually going to do that this year.  We’ve also been thinking about having a small home recording studio which would double as a spare bedroom. I’m working on an improved sidecar design and a couple trailer designs for very specialized purposes. I have MANY more things I want to try with musical instrument building. (Percussion and amp building are on my mind right now.) Also, I’m building a time machine so I can go back to meet my great-great-great grandfather and ask him to define “happiness” in one sentence. I just hope I don’t mess up the space-time continuum in the process.

Order out How & Why right here.

For the sake of transparency and to operate under the same requirements of a 501c3, we will continue to publish our financial reports.

2010 Income $383,024.12 (increased $70,000 from last year) 

Expenses

=========

Total staff wages (divided between Nate, Jessie, Rio, Adam, Joe, Matt, Rio, Sparky, Steven, Dylan, and Chris) $47,298.74. (Paying an average annual wage of $4,729.87) (50% decrease!, 12% of budget))

Printing Bills $57,587.66 (a 26% decrease, 14.8% of budget)

Shipping $69,352.77 (73% increase!, 17.9% of budget)

Publishers and distributors $129,365.09 (339% increase, 33.5% of budget)

Zines bought from makers $24,315.73 (35% decrease, 6.2% of budget) 

Rent $14,480 (3.6% of budget)

Utilities, insurance, phone, office supplies, etc $6,682.77 (1.7% of budget)

Royalties to authors $20,256 (47% increase!, 5.2% of budget))

Travel $4,881 (1.2% of budget)

Catalog Printing $3,658.93 (.9% of budget)

Donations $4,975 

Staff Healthcare $3,576 (.9% of budget)

Advertising $4,410.52 (1% of budget)

=================

Total Expenses $385,865.21

Total $-7,815.47 (loss) 

We’ve made two significant changes to our operation—we will no longer be publishing as many books and we will have stronger requirements for the zines that we distribute. The former change was decided at our annual meeting in May of 2010, but due to the weight of our existing release schedule, it took some time to reach that point. 

In the future we will focus primarily on publishing instructional DIY books and distributing DIY themed, politically powerful, and popular zines. 

Distributed zines will be required to sell at least 40 copies per issue per year in order to remain in the catalog. Because we have such an extensive zine catalog and pay zinemakers before the zines have sold, we end up buying a lot of zines that sadly live their lives in the packing room, not being read.

We think that with these changes we should be back on our feet by the end of the year and able to pay the zinemakers, ourselves, and our bills. 

In the short term, our finances are in dire straits. We are working hard to pay off bills from December. If you are able to donate, it would be an excellent time. We’ve recently took on a lot of new items in the catalog and published the new How and Why and Edible Secrets books. After hopes that our holiday sales would cover

more of these expenses, it seems we’ve bit off a bit more than we can chew. The writing has always been on the wall that there isn’t much money in this kind of work. 

We have decided to operate as not-for-profit without being a 501c3, because, to an extent, it allows us to put our mission ahead of our finances without being managed by an outside board of directors. Being a collectively-run publisher and distributor of zines and related work is important to us, and as always, Microcosm strives to add credibility to zine writers and their ethics, teach self empowerment, show hidden history, and nurture people’s creative side! 

We are currently accepting donations:

You can send paypal donations to 

orders@microcosmpublishing.com You could call with a credit card donation. (503) 232-3666. Checks can go to Microcosm 636 SE 11th Ave. Portland, OR 97214. Please specify it’s a donation with your check so we don’t think we need to mail you something beyond our eternal gratitude.

But here’s to many more years of successful support of zine makers, distribution of radical literature, and giving people access to information—in print—that they is difficult to come by. 

All orders are also extra appreciated right now.

Thanks for all of the years of support!

-Microcosm

(Illustration by Rio Safari)

We have a quick update on our ongoing campaign wherein folks trade in Kindles for their price in books. Here’s the bounty scored by a zine lover in NYC when she traded her Kindle in!

ABOUT THE KINDLE EXCHANGE: Do you love print? Do you still read books? Did you get a Kindle for Christmas? Do you want to trade in your soulless faux-literary technology for its worth in good old fashioned books? Well, friends, Microcosm Publishing’s got your back! Beginning RIGHT NOW you can bring in your Christmas Kindle to the Microcosm store in Portland (636 SE 11th) and trade it in for its worth in new or used books and zines! That’s right! Why let fad technology kill print when you can take a stand and fill up your shelves in the process. (Don’t worry, we won’t tell your parents.) And make sure to bring a friend to help you carry all your loot; most of the store’s books are priced in the $2-$6 range so a $139-$189 trade-in (note: going retail for the Kindle at Amazon’s site) you might be carrying your books out in a fleet of wheelbarrows!

On Amazon’s Kindle page you’ll be able to read glowing endorsements like the following, “”My first impression of Kindle’s screen was: ‘That’s a screen?! It doesn’t look like a screen.’… It looks like a book page, only perfect. No grain or pulp.”—Jeremy.”

Well, you know what, Jeremy? We love the and grain and pulp. Long live the grain and pulp! Long live the PAGE.

Thanks for helping to keep print alive!

Microcosm Publishing book and zine store
636 SE 11th
Portland, Or 97214
11am-7pm, Seven days a week
503-232-3666
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Microcosm-hQ-Store/131220623559507