Shopkeeper

Trespassers:

The best time to estab­lish alternative, non-algorithmic net­works of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and affinity was five years ago.

The second best time is today!

Over the years, I’ve dis­trib­uted many zines through the mail. Those have been one-off productions, which is to say, pageants of minor chaos, always with the sense, as the last zine went out the door, of skid­ding into home plate.

For a while, I have won­dered if I could rec­tify this, making dis­tri­b­u­tion via mail both (1) easy for me, and (2) reli­able for you. I know it’s possible — we’ve been doing it for years with the olive oil company!

So, that’s all to say, I’ve opened a little shop, which is today stocked with two items:

• A limited-edition poster print from the launch of Moonbound
• The inaugural zine of a new era, combining a poster print with a mini-manifesto

I’m Robin Sloan, a fiction writer with wide-ranging interests, which I capture here in my newsletter. This is an archived edition, originally transmitted in March 2025. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

My goals here are manifold:

1. Make printing and dis­tri­b­u­tion a regular, ongoing activity, i.e. not some­thing I totally forget how to do between mailings.

2. Develop and refine this par­tic­ular format, the 11″ × 17″ Riso­graph print, tri-folded — unprecious, but not unspectacular.

3. Estab­lish a real phys­ical net­work. It’s fun to mail things, and fun to receive mail.

And this isn’t only for fun.

A pre­mo­ni­tion is growing. I believe large swaths of the internet will be ceded, like it or not, to the crea­tures of the dig­ital night: ghostly bots, cack­ling trolls, the baying hounds of attention. I imagine this future internet as a vast, boiling miasma, punc­tu­ated by signal towers poking up into the clear air: blogs and shops, bea­cons of reality and sincerity, nodes of a human overlay net­work.

So, I am plan­ning ahead, con­tem­plating new (old) sys­tems that might be better suited to the media ecology and economy of the 2020s and beyond. No grand launch here — just the quiet ignition, vroom, of a hopeful machine:

https://www.robinsloan.com/shop/

A note on the printing method, for those unfamiliar.

The Riso­graph is a dupli­cating machine designed and man­u­fac­tured by the Riso Kagaku Cor­po­ra­tion of Japan. It is spir­i­tual heir to the mimeograph, designed for orga­ni­za­tions that need to crank out a ton of printed material, every day, under their own steam — think of schools and churches.

Observing a Riso, big and beige in the corner of the office, you’d assume it was a copier, but in fact it works like an auto­matic silkscreen. For each new design, the machine cuts a phys­ical stencil. Prints are pro­duced not by blending micro­scopic CMYK droplets, a la inkjet, but rather by pressing thick ink (made from rice bran oil!) through that stencil. Because the Riso lays down real sheets of spot color, that color can have spe­cial phys­ical properties, e.g. the ocular assault (impossible to cap­ture with a camera) of Riso Flu­o­res­cent Pink.

The Riso­graph has, over the past decade or so, devel­oped a cult fol­lowing among artists and zine-makers, thanks to the machine’s bal­ance of quality and economy. It’s also because the printing process imposes all sorts of appealing lim­i­ta­tions and imperfections — little analog bul­warks against the march of dig­ital perfection. No two Riso prints are quite the same.

I really love this machine, and I’m proud to use it both for practical, business-y pur­poses (all the col­lat­eral for Fat Gold is Riso-printed) and also in this zine-y context.

My project is also, of course, an exer­cise in USPS fandom — a way to revel in the capacity of this demo­c­ratic infrastructure, its pro­found invitation.

Now, I think it’s impor­tant that admirers of the USPS (of which I am an extreme example) avoid the trap of Post Office Eternalism. It is very, VERY tempting to appeal to the insti­tu­tion’s flashy con­sti­tu­tional cameo, and to remind readers that it was founded before the United States itself … but the truth is that the postal ser­vice has been, from 1775 onward, rest­less and contested. Form and function, scope and mandate: all in flux.

So, rather than ges­ture mean­ing­fully in the direc­tion of the past, I think it’s better — more honest — to simply state what we want from this insti­tu­tion here and now in the 21st century.

Turns out, what I want is pretty close to what we have, because the USPS is the only dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work in the United States that con­nects everyone to everyone. If the mail is frus­trating sometimes, it’s because this is a huge, weird country, with a lot of long lonely roads in it. UPS doesn’t deliver to those places. Amazon doesn’t, either.

The USPS does it all, everywhere.

And its rates are still sort of shock­ingly low when you con­sider the scope and, yes, the speed of that ser­vice. There’s more on this sub­ject in my inau­gural zine, but/and, I’ll con­fess here that a cen­tral cat­a­lyst for my excite­ment has been the Global For­ever stamp: $1.65, and it car­ries an ounce of mail any­where in the world.

Any­where in the WORLD!

The best time to estab­lish alternative, non-algorithmic net­works of com­mu­ni­ca­tion — to forge durable links in phys­ical space — to insist upon the demo­c­ratic neces­sity of a muscular, uni­versal postal ser­vice — was five years ago.

The second best time is today.

From the lab,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter in early April.

March 2025