Pinball Open House Party
featuring Datr & DJ Sarah Lund, Pinball Publishing, 1003 SE Grant, Saturday June 4, 6 pm – late, free
In just four years of existence, Pinball Publishing has gone from a humble little space on SE Clinton to a humble, much bigger warehouse space on SE Grant, stuffed with large, impressive pieces of machinery that look like they could kill a man. Known in the book world for its beautiful literary review (eye~rhyme) and poetry collections. Pinball’s bread and butter is the print design work it does for a rather amazing clientele that includes Stumptown Coffee, the Motel Gallery, and Matt McCormick’s PDX Film Fest. As Pinball gears up for its first open house party in its new space, I dropped by to ask head honchos Laura Brian and Austin Whipple two questions:
What does “printing” for a client entail exactly?
AUSTIN WHIPPLE: Printing includes anything from business cards to stationary systems to posters to music packaging to things like bookmarks.
But didn’t you start Pinball as a publishing house for books and poetry?
AW: We never really felt that the publishing would be the way we would survive financially. It was the investment in the equipment that allowed us to publish [eye-rhyme and other] work that we did. Instead of spending $5000 or whatever on paying another press to print it, we were kind of like, “well, the little money that we have for this project–maybe we should invest it in equipment instead…”
LAURA BRIAN: The production tools give us flexibility. We break even on our own projects and then print projects for other people, which keeps everything afloat.
AW: It was never really our goal to say, “it needs to make enough that we can live on,” because that completely changes your publishing goals.
LB: I think it can lead to some bitter feelings. You expect too much from something and then it disappoints you. At this point we’re not expecting eye~rhyme to be a big moneymaker. The aim is to have a good time and to learn while we’re doing it.