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Word on the street is that millennial beige has gone to die in a shop on Southeast Division Street. John James Dudek and Cielle Charron are in their second year as co-owners of Secret Room (3225 SE Division St., 530-400-7883, secretroompress.com), where trinkets, cassettes and art books are nestled among a sea of bright risograph prints, zines and comics. Earlier this month, a show from the Bangkok risograph studio 2 in Row filled the shop’s small gallery space.
The hodgepodge print shop and storefront is, in many ways, a souvenir shop of the couple’s lives: They source from all over, stocking small press artists they’ve met at tabling events and books printed in runs of fewer than 50 copies.
The shop’s grounding mission is ever relevant to the digital world, where content knows no bounds and the pressure to be perfect is high. Dudek and Charron want visitors to embrace small-scale personal work, imperfections and all, starting with the artwork they print themselves.
The couple runs a print shop out of the real secret room (a shed behind their home), where they experiment with layering colors and binding books. The end product can at times be a little blurry, or the print might misregister. But Charron says that human touch is becoming all the more valuable. “You can see that a person made it,” she says, “instead of just hitting print.”
More broadly, the pair takes great pride in introducing small press books and prints to Portlanders and tourists alike. The shop’s a hole in the wall, but it’s filled to the brim with small objects that one can peruse for hours. And it might be one of few places in the city where no one gets bored: Charron has seen moms come in with their teenage sons, only for both to be entertained. “How rare is that, that you have a mom and teen son both saying, ‘Yes, this rocks’?” she says. “That’s huge.”
See the rest of Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2026 here!
