Stumptown
Chappel
P.O.
Box 2556 Portland 97208, 233-7478
firefly@spiritone.com
Contact the Independent Publishing Resource Center
through Reading Frenzy,
921 SW Oak St., 274-1449.
Craggy punks in spiked leather jackets season cups of keg
beer with shots of Jack Daniels. Moustached men in late middle-age
hover over a gourmet caterers' spread. Hippie types in the
uniform of working rebels everywhere--Carhartts, flannels,
beards--mill around a corner of light in an otherwise desolate
warehouse. An orphaned rock stage haunts one corner; debris
litters the floor, stretching into winter-cold darkness.
Next to a space heater, a banjo picker and a fiddler evoke
highway ghosts and mountain echoes. A small, brightly lit
room is tucked in the corner of the warehouse's expanse.
Tricked-out indie hipsters chat with guys whose work shirts
and pegged trousers make them look like time-traveling ambassadors
from the Depression.
This unlikely gang hasn't gathered at the end of a dark
street in inner Southeast's industrial shadowland to start
some subcultural revolutionary soviet--though you could
be forgiven that fantasy.
In fact, this fête honors two big machines.
Glistening with oil, two printing presses sit, silent,
in the small office of Stumptown Chappel. One is an old-school
letterpress job built in the '30s, which marries power hydraulics
with the same hand-set type process Ben Franklin used on
Poor Richard's. The other is an aging off-set press,
the basic technology used to print this newspaper, about
the scale of a good-sized desk.
These iron altars form the center of the secular faith
espoused by this Chappel--and that's two P's, please. That's
how the scribes who once gathered to hand-copy medieval
tomes spelled it, that's the spelling passed down by generations
of printers through informal networks, and that's the name
preferred by Eric Bagdonas, Brian Bagdonas and Rebecca Gilbert,
the three yeoman printers of Stumptown.
Uniting their collective energy and two distinct projects,
the Stumptown trio fuses a respect for rock-ribbed craftsmanship
with a dedication to the DIY spirit of punk rock, radical
politics and grassroots art. If their grand-opening party
at the end of January is any measure, the combination strikes
a nerve in the underground.
"In punk rock circles everyone wants to be a printer,"
says Gilbert, who, along with Brian Bagdonas, runs the Chappel's
letterpress division, Firefly Press. "Everyone's always
saying, oh, if only I could print my 'zine, or if only I
could print my record cover."
True to punk heritage, Brian and his brother Eric, who
handles offset printing under the aegis of his own Blackberry
Press, started on their printers' path at Kinko's. Pulling
together 'zines and flyers on digital rental equipment,
the Dayton, Ohio, natives developed a crush on the process
of pressing ink into pulp.
After years of working day jobs at other presses and design
shops, Gilbert and the brothers put in nights in a studio
hammered together in the old bottling plant that opened
briefly as the all-ages club Glass Factory this fall. Fueled
by a reservoir of enthusiasm, they started taking on jobs
a few months before the official opening reception drew
its motley crowd.
"I think we got curious about where everything came from,"
says Brian in the downy, thoughtful heartland drawl the
brothers share. "You start digging a little bit, and you
learn what genius craftsmen and artists these old printers
were. Back in the day, it would take years to design one
typeface. So much that goes on in graphic design right now
happens without people having any sense of the history of
what they're doing."
Similarly, Gilbert built an interest in graphic design
into a mild obsession with the glacial process that forged
letter-shapes used today. "I started to want to learn how
it actually worked--on a small scale, physically,"
she says.
Academically, there are easier assignments. Gilbert had
to design her own course of study, splitting time between
the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Oregon College
of Arts and Crafts. Meanwhile, Eric and Brian immersed themselves
in printing's raucous history--a saga peopled by labor radicals
and itinerant hellraisers who found their life's work in
the original Information Age.
Indeed, a fascination with the creed and lore of their
chosen craft seems to drive the Stumptowners as much as
anything.
"Print shops were community centers, a place where people
could come and talk, get the gossip and organize on a grassroots
basis," Brian says. "You start researching this stuff and
you discover that these printers were these crazy characters
and rebels. Printers, in fact, were some of the first true
rebels, I think, that there were."
That history jibes well with the trio's own political and
social affinities. Eric is a member of the Industrial Workers
of the World's printing union, and Blackberry is in good
standing with the old anarcho-syndicalist outfit. Gilbert
and Brian say they hope to square Firefly with a union soon,
as much for tradition's sake as anything. The three also
want to do their part for DIY culture through volunteer
work with the Independent Publishing Resource Center and,
eventually, an old-fashioned apprenticeship program.
On a downpour-sodden night before their grand opening party,
Fugazi's Repeater trades places with plangent old-time
bluegrass on a tiny tape deck in the Stumptown studio. Bottles
of Rolling Rock emerge from a knee-high dorm fridge; smoked
cheese sliced with a pocketknife is on offer. Despite Stumptown's
devotion to printing's old ways, this isn't retro for-its-own-sake
and it's not an exercise in reviving the past. Stumptown
is proof that the past didn't really go anywhere. As they
churn out 'zines, record covers, wedding invitations and
business cards, the three printers let the old days and
the future live as one.
"More than anything, we want to make these techniques available
to people," Brian Bagdonas says. "It's starting to get to
the point where this sort of knowledge is inaccessible to
young people like us. A lot of it is taught in art schools,
which can be so very expensive. We're trying to make it
accessible to people."
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Willamette Week | originally
published February 9,
2000
|
