Radical independent publisher PM Press has launched a crowdfunding campaign, “Book by Book, Brick by Brick,” to fortify its infrastructure and build community ahead of its 20th anniversary in 2027. PM has set a goal of $250,000, enough to pay off the remainder of the five-year fixed-rate mortgage on its warehouse.
Ramsey Kanaan, PM’s founder and publisher, hopes the campaign can assuage some of the precarity inherent in radical publishing. “If you think of institutions on the left, they come and go,” Kanaan said. “A lot of it boils down to owning property. The reason that City Lights are still there in gentrified San Francisco is because they own the building.”
PM’s already been priced out of the Bay Area. In 2022, PM Press moved its operations from Oakland, Calif., to the 17,000 square foot warehouse in Binghamton, N.Y. At this spacious, all-purpose home base, PM stores and ships its titles, fulfills orders for affiliates including Working Class History, and distributes micro-press titles and merchandise.
Since moving to the Binghamton warehouse, the publisher has also used it as a community space for social justice organizing and cultural events. It hosts an annual Upstate Anarchist Book Fair each May Day and back-to-school supply drives in August.
“The warehouse is this crucial hub, not just for ourselves, but for that wider ecology of the left and other groups that we support,” Kanaan said. “For us, the fundraising is to try and make concrete—pun somewhat intended—steps toward longevity.”
The warehouse isn’t the only upstate institution PM wants to secure. As of January 2023, PM purchased Autumn Leaves used bookstore in Ithaca and relaunched it as a general interest new-and-used shop. PM leases the 6,000-square-foot Autumn Leaves building.
“It’s a huge bookstore—we have 60,000 titles,” Kanaan said, adding that PM and Autumn Leaves now partner with Buffalo Street Books, Odyssey Bookstore, and local literary organizations to cosponsor the annual Ithaca Is Books festival. Counting the four bookstore staffers, PM now has 18 full-time employees.
Strategizing for the future
PM publishes about 36 titles per year and is distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West. Its forthcoming titles include feminist self-defense proponent Jessica Lawless’s Cultural Capital Doesn’t Pay the Rent (April), sustainability champion Joe Uehlein’s Three Roads: Labor, Music, Ecology (May), and Madeleine Hamlin and Carlos Declós’s Housing Justice (April).
About 1,300 patrons contribute to the press via a multi-tiered subscription program, Friends of PM, and about 800 of those opt to receive a monthly mailing of the latest PM titles. Kanaan explained that subscribers “take a lot of the economic guesswork out of our editorial decisions. If we can pre-sell 1,000 of a book we choose to publish, it’s a way of increasing the economies of scale.”
In addition to the warehouse fundraiser and dependable subscribers, PM has asked supporters for help producing specialty editions. One recent project was a full-color illustrated account of an anarcho-punk women's band, This Is a Message to Persons Unknown: The Story of the Poison Girls (Nov.), cocreated by counterculture historian Rich Cross, designer Alec Dunn, and documentarian Erin Yanke.
“If that were commercially priced, it’d be a $70 paperback, and no one can afford to buy that,” Kanaan said. “We raised $15,000 in a Kickstarter to subsidize that print cost and put a $35 list price on it. We’ve always found creative ways to appeal to different communities to support that wider project we have of disseminating radical ideas.”
Several like-minded organizations also partner with PM, which warehouses and ships their titles and merchandise. One of these is Labor Notes, a 501c3 nonprofit and a non-hierarchical collective of 17 staffers. Labor Notes publishes practical guidebooks for the rank-and-file including Secrets of a Successful Organizer, How to Jump-Start Your Union, and the catalog of Robert M. Schwartz’s Work Rights Press, including The Legal Rights of Union Stewards.
Labor Notes board director Ellen David Friedman, author of the PM/LN copublication Keep Going: A Guide to Organizing When Its Hard (August), said working with PM connects her organization to the book trade.
“The freedom of the press and diversity of opinion are in great danger,” Friedman said, “but our readership and book sales have increased, and our conferences have gotten big. We think Americans—and people who live here—are interested in defending democracy, and access to critical ideas is essential to that.”
PM also handles fulfillment for the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a project of the UE Research and Education Fund, a worker-focused 501c3 nonprofit. EWOC publishes a handbook, Unite and Win: The Workplace Organizer’s Handbook, and sells shirts, pins, and gear with pro-union messages.
“We wouldn’t have been able to do the online store without them,” EWOC director Megan Svoboda told PW. “I used to have things shipped to the shared office, and I’d print out the mailing labels and take 20 packages to the post office. Now it’s organized and they manage our inventory.”
For Kanaan, PM is an indispensible resource for radical and progressive writers and readers. “These are not the most auspicious times to be raising money,” he readily admitted. “People are economically strapped, and it’s not like we want to compete for scarce resources.”
Nevertheless, he believes activists can buttress the movement by investing in PM’s long-term success. “We want to make the case that we’re creating the infrastructure where scarce resources can be used better,” he said. “We want to create a space where people can not only engage with ideas, but take that engagement and spiral it out into the wider community.”
