Community memory

Happy Labor Day. I wrote a Wikipedia article about the gay, anarchist, anti-profit publishing collective Come!Unity Press after stumbling across a poster they printed in 1971.

Serendipitously, while researching this article I came across a March 2024 talk about “Survival By Sharing” by Paul Soulellis , which features a photograph of a Community Memory terminal.

I'd come across some photos of these while looking for public domain photos of computers a couple weeks ago, and was disappointed at the time that I couldn't find a better photo than ones like this on Wikimedia Commons (derived from a scan of a 1974 newsletter):

Soulellis’ talk, however, features a much better photo of this very same terminal at Leopold's Records in Berkeley, CA, likely taken at the same time based on the outfit of the person featured in both shots!

A high-quality black-and-white-photo of two people operating the same community memory machine as pictured in the above photo.

The talk, which focuses on community and archives and collaborative art and resistance, has some really interesting throughlines with some of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.

The Signal Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture published an interview with an early member of the C!UP collective in issue 5. You can borrow a copy for free from the Internet Archive. I was curious how the anarchists went from operating a printing press for a group of Quakers in exchange for free rent to running the whole shop. Turns out it came down to conflicts over topics including their nudism and a "political prisoner" (kitten) named Kropotkin. Signal recounts the story.

There’s another story from an early member of the collective to be found in the comments of a site called The People’s Graphic Design Archive: “They liked th[e rainbow ink] effect so much that they charged extra to print plain black ink”.

LEE MOST
MON, OCT 30, 2023
I crashed at the Come!Unity Press for several months in the early 1970s. Lin was very supportive and helped me “find myself” after I left home. I eventually decided against joining their collective, and became an apprentice locksmith instead, so I left their communal living space.

One interesting thing collectors of their printed materials might like to know is the way they applied ink to the rollers of their offset printing press resulted in mass producing unique printed products that had a slightly different set of foreground and background colors each time the rollers printed a new page. Each run had different colors and no flyer had exactly the same colors as the one printed before it.

They had a policy of recycling as much as they could, so they often reused paper by printing over old print jobs, which sometimes resulted in printed products with so much color that they were hard for color-blind people to read them. (The ADA would not be passed until decades later, but I'm sure Lin would have simply insisted on using different colors or trying out lighter and lighter background colors until the customer would give up and say it was legible!)

They liked that effect so much that they charged extra to print plain black ink because it meant cleaning all the colored ink off each of the machine's rollers before printing plain black and then after that print run when the next run would use colored ink.

Anyway, each of their print jobs was unique.