Sustained beyond these Institutions: The Small Press Traffic Print Collection Archives
Nick Sturm
“the history of arts organizations is so ephemeral”1
—Robert Glück
There is a material buzz in the Et al. Gallery’s reading room, the home of the Small Press Traffic Print Collection Archives. Organized for public access with the support of a two-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, the archive is a living library of over 2,500 small press books, chapbooks, little magazines, newsletters, zines, flyers, and broadsides. Pull a title from the shelves — Krupskaya or Kelsey Street, The Crossing Press or Commonwealth, Big Sky or Black Star Series, Tuumba or Timeless, Infinite Light — and a networked history of Bay Area small press publishing begins to unfold. Jack Spicer’s Fifteen False Propositions About God from Manroot Books hovers alongside Jamie Townsend’s Propositions from Mondo Bummer. Issues of magazines like Beatitude, Big Bell, and Blind Date stack up next to HOW(ever), High Noon, and Jimmy & Lucy’s House of K. Reaching back to Josephine Miles’s Local Measures (1946), the oldest book in the collection, all the way to the present small press scene, these accumulating proximities of publishers, authors, formats, and aesthetic directions reveal decades of overlapping writing communities oriented toward radical and experimental literature. A space for participation and study, the Print Collection Archives attest to Small Press Traffic’s catalytic role shaping the literary history of the last half-century.
Since its establishment in 1974 as a few shelves of books sold on consignment in Paperback Traffic, the first commercial gay bookstore in the Castro, Small Press Traffic has facilitated decades of literary community, friendship, and arts organizing through its commitment to small press publishing. Driven by the scrappy ethos of alternative publishing, founders Denise Kastan and Jim Mitchell quickly transformed the consignment concept into its own nonprofit bookstore combining retail, readings, workshops, and distribution.2 The uniquely hybrid project joined a thriving local small press ecosystem encompassing such organizations as the West Coast Print Center, Small Press Distribution, the Before Columbus Foundation, New Langton Arts, and Intersection for the Arts. Ongoing transformations within the Bay Area’s literary communities, including lineages of San Francisco Renaissance and Beat writers intersecting with Language poetry, California Chicanx literature, and new forms of liberatory politics, were amplified by Small Press Traffic’s dynamic programming. “[T]here are generations of people that have come out of Small Press Traffic, the workshops, all of it,” said Robert Glück, who began the organization’s reading series in 1978. It was a space where “people formed relationships that lasted forever.”3
Those literary relationships are bound up in how Small Press Traffic creates access to writing produced and distributed outside of standard channels. Kevin Killian, a longtime lynchpin of Bay Area poetry, remembered “this quiet little bookstore” in Noe Valley as the site that reoriented his understanding of contemporary literature: “In the front two rooms — divided by French doors kept permanently opened — trays, racks, shelves of poetry books, books I never heard of, lay open and available from around the world. So, this was the small press. I had never even heard that phrase before.” Charged by the unfamiliar stock, Killian allowed himself to fall under the spell of these “open and available” books, inaugurating him into a new literary community at SPT. “I came nearly every day,” he said. “For years, it was the center of my life.”4
Killian wasn’t alone. By 1980, and with over 3,000 small press titles in stock, the bookstore (managed by Kastan) was a vital hub for Bay Area writers, hosting Gloria Anzaldua’s reading series El Mundo Zurdo, meetings of the Women’s Writers Union, Bruce Boone’s “Marxism & Theory of Writing” study group, and a now-famous series of workshops, “a kind of New Narrative laboratory,” organized by Glück.5 “For a long time it was the only place you could find certain books,” said Glück, who began volunteering at the store in 1976.6 Forging its own relationship to commerce, SPT’s policy of selling books for their original retail price, no matter how long they were in stock or how rare they became, upheld the small press resistance to commodity-oriented publishing norms. “Here’s one place,” said former director Katherine Harer, “where people can live in this other kind of economy.”7
These utopic literary conditions make Small Press Traffic a magnet for writers and students across the city. Though a downturn in federal arts funding led to the closure of SPT’s “experimental bookstore” in 1995, the organization’s momentum continued as an independent literary resource collaborating with Bay Area writing programs, first at New College and then at California College of the Arts.8 These affiliations facilitated SPT’s growth, agility, and community-oriented programming, including hosting an ever-expanding slate of readings, conferences, workshops, publishing initiatives, and beloved poets theater performances. “What was really important was that we wanted to get together outside of the university,” said Renee Gladman, who became a part of the SPT community while studying at New College and in 2000, with giovanni singleton, organized the watershed gathering Expanding the Repertoire: Continuity and Change in African-American Writing.9 Writers like Pamela Lu, David Buuck, Yedda Morrison, Aaron Shurin, Camille Roy, and many others sought out readings and workshops at SPT as liberating alternatives to the academy. For Dodie Bellamy, who participated in Glück’s workshops while taking courses at San Francisco State University and eventually became director of Small Press Traffic (1995-1999), this was SPT’s special capacity, to create “a way that things can be sustained beyond these institutions.”10
The Small Press Traffic Print Collection Archives allow the products of these relationships and collaborations to come into focus, enabling us to see the intergenerational publishing communities that flowed through and constituted the organization. For Syd Staiti, who formalized and secured funding for the renewed stewardship of the archives during his directorship (2019-2024), the decision to make these materials publicly available was a natural continuation of the organization’s mission beyond institutions. The collection is full of “hand-produced chapbooks, pamphlets, and small zines made by individuals and groups of friends, shared through networks of sociality,” Staiti noted, so “it seemed important that they be held in a community space. […] The hope is that people who might be reluctant to visit a university library archive would feel comfortable at a gallery and bookstore in the Mission to explore decades of literary production made outside of the institution, without big budgets, and perhaps even to feel inspired to start their own.”11
It’s hard not to feel inspired by this history in the Print Collection Reading Room, an intimate space where one encounters, like Killian in the original Small Press Traffic bookstore, “shelves of poetry books… open and available from around the world.” Curated on the occasion of SPT’s fiftieth anniversary, Gabrielle Civil explored this sense of intimacy and exchange in her five-part performance Where Would I Be Without You?, a generative mixture of multimedia performance, collective composition, and historical engagement based on SPT’s archives. Considering friendship, memory, and lineage, Civil and her audience together “took things from the archive and activated them and then activated ourselves and put that back into the archive,” demonstrating the spirit of experimentation and embodied participation that distinguishes the Print Collections Archives from traditional institutional collections. Renewed relationships and ways of being together in literary community form in response. As Civil notes about her experience of the materials, “You see all this very intense, human behavior that is just waiting to be re-engaged through our presence in this contemporary moment.”12 Sorting through the SPT archives, what does it look like in the present moment, for instance, to think about literary feminist publishing by reading issues of Kathleen Fraser’s HOW(ever) next to the Dodie Bellamy-edited Mirage: The Women’s Issue? Or to sit with the “Writing as Activism” issue of David Buuck’s Tripwire alongside one of the many SPT-related products of the Occupy Movement, like Sara Wintz’s The Feeling I$ Mutual: A List of Our Fucking Demands? How can the history of New Narrative be enlivened by reading its extensions into the 1990s and early 2000s, through publications like Renee Gladman’s magazine Clamour? What new publishing experiments might emerge from seeing titles from White Rabbit Press, Oyez, and The Auerhahn Press in proximity to books and chapbooks published by Post-Apollo Press, Etherdome, Instress, Ypolita Press, and Summer BF Press?
These questions, and many more, become possible with access to the Small Press Traffic Print Collection Archives. In this space beyond institutions, there’s a fragility to our underground and countercultural histories, a way that the stories of organizations like SPT, and the ancestors and lineages that sustained them, become harder to access owing to economic, political, and aesthetic erasures. With this ephemerality in mind, it is crucial to recognize the archive as not only an unique assemblage of rare books, but as an organic library of community-produced print goods with new donations continually flowing in (often from ad-hoc archives housed in garages and closets) that strengthen, complicate, and disrupt our preconceived understandings of our shared history. Our ability to narrate these small press histories continues to unfold through SPT’s collection. Even as online magazines have become an increasingly accessible medium in the last two decades, the archive shows how poets in the Bay have continued to produce print magazines at an incredible pace, including Eric Sneathen’s Macaroni Necklace, Alli Warren’s Dreamboat, and Steve Orth’s Where Eagles Dare, all of which, in their own idiosyncratic ways, can be traced back to publications from the 1970s and 1980s, like Soup, Panjandrum, and Gay Sunshine. We can also read the stories of whole communities of poets and poetic thought with access to literary newsletters like Poetry Flash, Archive Newsletter from the Archive for New Poetry at the University of California San Diego, and more wayward publications like Aldon Nielsen’s lower level speech: a newsletter in poetics with its UPPER LEVEL MUSIC supplements out of San Jose.
Beyond institutions, Small Press Traffic continues to collect, organize, and catalyze small press publishing, and to support the poets who animate those communities. As Jerry Thompson, SPT’s recent Archive Fellow, showcased in his public program “Soul Tether Revival,” personal archives are sites of social and aesthetic survival, communal spaces to gather together around what’s far out and unfamiliar in favor of newly imagined futures.13 Alongside spaces like For Keeps Books in Atlanta, which hosts a reading table of rotating Black print materials, and Interference Archive in Brooklyn, a noninstitutional collection of social movement materials, the Print Collection Archives are designed, says current SPT executive director Maxe Crandall, to be a place where “literary work is community work.” As crucial Bay Area writer and publisher Lyn Hejinian said, since its founding over fifty years ago, Small Press Traffic has oriented itself toward “ideals, community, a dizzying sense that it would all come out right in the end.”14 The Print Collection Archives is the fresh embodiment of this openness and possibility.
Robert Glück and Denise Kastan on the cover of Intersection, 1980.
1 Joyce Jenkins. “Speaking to the Future: A Talk about Small Press Traffic.” Poetry Flash no. 274 (Nov/Dec 1997).
2 For a detailed early history of SPT, see “Small Press Traffic” by Joan Borus in Intersection Newsletter vol. 10 issue 2, Spring 1980.
3 Jenkins, “Speaking to the Future.”
4 Kevin Killian. “3841-B 24th Street, The Original Small Press Traffic.” Oral history interview with John Moore Williams. 2018.
5 Robert Glück, “Long Note on New Narrative.” Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, ed. Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy, Gail Scott. Coach House Books, 2004.
6 Jenkins, “Speaking to the Future.”
7 Katherine Harer. Oral history interview with Eric Sneathen. October 28, 2024.
8 Denise Kastan. Oral history interview with Eric Sneathen. October 2, 2022.
9 Renee Gladman. Oral history interview with Syd Stati. January 21, 2015.
10 Nikki Thompson, “Small Press Traffic History.” 2001.
11 Syd Stati, email message to author, April 29, 2025.
12 Gabrielle Civil, “Holding onto Feelings: Gabrielle Civil in Conversation with Theadora Walsh.” The Back Room, 2024.
13 “Soul Tether Revival: A Homecoming with Michael Ross and Friends.” Small Press Traffic, 2025.
14 Thompson, “Small Press Traffic History.”
Nick Sturm teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta. His book on small press print culture, publishing communities, and the New York School is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. He is the editor of Early Works by Alice Notley (Fonograf Editions) and co-editor, with Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan, and Edmund Berrigan, of Get the Money!: Collected Prose, 1961-1983 by Ted Berrigan (City Lights). More information about his research, scholarship, and teaching can be found at nicksturm.com.
