Small presses have a long history in Philly. In fact, publishing is one of the city’s oldest industries. Just three years after its founding, the city already had its first printing press. And by the end of the 18th century, Philadelphia had become the center for book printing and publishing in the entire country, surpassing New York and Boston.

Today, centuries later, small and independent presses continue to play a vital role in the city’s literary and intellectual landscape. 

Much like publishers back then who helped shape political discourse when ideas like freedom of speech were central in conceiving independence from Britain, today’s publishing houses are increasingly committed to a socially engaged, thought-provoking mission.

To them, the mission does not compromise the quality of content, but rather redefines it, prioritizing voices that have long been unheard and ensuring that publishing remains a space for meaningful encounters and dialogue.

Billy Penn spoke with several small, independent publishers to learn how they are reshaping this legacy, each with their own approach but a shared commitment to promoting diversity, creativity and sustainability.

We are sharing our conversations with them as a series of articles. So far we have spoken to Josh O’Neill (Beehive Books), Linda Gallant (The Head and the Hand), Doug Gordon (New Door Books), Alison M. Lewis (Frayed Edge Press), Malav Kanuga (Common Notions), Paul Dry (Paul Dry Books), and Christine Neulieb (Lanternfish Press).

This installment welcomes Connie Yu and Andra Palchick, of Many Folds Press and FORTUNE.

So, start the presses!

Connie Yu and Andra Palchick, co-editors of Many Folds Press and co-founders of FORTUNE 

Tell us about yourselves.

Connie: I am a writer, an artist, and I have been working with Andra on a print collective project called FORTUNE, which was also co-founded by a third person, Heidi Ratanavanich. We started FORTUNE over six years ago, and we started our press in 2022. 

Andra: I’m also an artist, but my work is largely based in print and I’m also an information worker. I work as an archivist. I see both print and archival work as overlapping and a way to practice more literary forms of sharing information and documentation, within this larger umbrella of memory work. We have been collaborating together since 2018.

Tell us more about how FORTUNE was conceived and what led you to start Many Folds.

Connie: FORTUNE started as a way of gathering queer and trans Asian artists and writers, both on the page and in the room together. And in our first year of production, we printed monthly zines. They were all submission-based, so we had other queer and trans Asian writers and artists submit their work. We published these monthly, releasing them with some form of gathering each month. And we called these zines FORTUNES. So, they were named FORTUNES after the print collective project, as well. And through that process, we realized that the gathering was really integral to our printing practice.

Since that year of regularly publishing zines, we’ve found ways to gather in other ways, as well. So that includes more artistic programming, longer curatorial efforts, and regular events. 

One project that we were working on in 2020 was to print a second edition of those FORTUNE zines. We were working on putting together a box set of all 13 issues. And at the time, it was a lockdown and, due to the pandemic, we were really struggling to find access to a risograph machine. At the time in 2020, a lot of them were held at academic institutions, art schools, and understandably they were hard to access by the general public. So, we came to realize that if we wanted to continue doing this work and continue to publish work more independently that we would also need to have our own means of production.

So that got us on the path towards purchasing our risograph secondhand and, after that, we started Many Folds Press, as a way to make this service a little bit more available to a public that didn’t necessarily have access to it. 

Where do you think the idea or the need to gather together comes from?

Andra: Before we started printing our monthly zines in 2019, we actually first came together at the beginning of 2018 when Connie co-curated a group show for queer Asian artists and writers at the Kelly Writers House. 

It was a public opening, but there was a roundtable moment that was just for contributing artists and some friends of artists to gather before the larger public came, to meet each other and talk about our work. What really struck everyone was that it was a consensus that that was something that everyone in that room had not had before — this intentional gathering with other queer artists of the Asian diaspora and how special and unique that was.

At the beginning of 2019 — it was kind of the one-year anniversary of the “A Public Opening” show, and it also fell around the time of the Lunar New Year — it felt like a moment to celebrate together and also a moment for intention-setting. So, that is when we set this intention of doing these monthly zines for a year. The gathering and printing have always felt like they necessitate each other for us. They feel very entwined.

Based on your experiences, how do you see the landscape of independent publishing evolving in Philly — both in terms of access to publishing tools and the sense of connection within the community?

Connie: I think with publishing, it depends on the sort of levels that we’re talking about. With mainstream publishing, it’s often an issue of who’s being represented and maybe why they’re being represented, but I find that in Philly, and in a lot of cities actually, there are always ways to be connected with independent publishers. Philly has several different zine fairs and comics fairs throughout the year.

With art publishing, there’s a lot of interest in the risograph printing. I think there are definitely opportunities to find political and aesthetic solidarity in this kind of work. I feel pretty hopeful about where we are, and about continuing to find my roots and my people in the city.

Andra: Since the time we’ve been working together, it does feel like the game has changed a little bit and in an exciting way. When we first started printing the FORTUNE zines, most risographs were held by institutions like universities. Since then, we’ve also noticed other independent artists or print collectives being able to acquire their own risographs — their own means of printing. 

What are you publishing now?

Connie: Currently, we are working on a project with a dear friend, the artist Rami George, producing a beautiful book project that centers new work from seven Palestinian artists. That’s what we’re working on in terms of production with Many Folds Press right now. And then, otherwise, we have a program in the summer that we’ve been running for three years, in collaboration with Ulises and Icebox Project Space. It’s called the Big Summer Book Sale. And we bring together many different bookstores, publishers and print collectives to do a one-day book fair. That’ll come this July.

And what kinds of projects — or not just projects, but books or any other printed forms — have you published in the last three years? What do you typically focus on?

Andra: We are definitely open to inquiries from artists and writers. Most of them who come to us are local, I’d say. 

One of our first projects was two new works for Our Mother’s Kitchen, which was a culinary and literary summer program for Black youth that was held at Sankofa Farm. Throughout the three summers that they were working, they collected writings, poetry from the youth. We helped them publish a collection of those works. 

Then we also alongside worked on a piece called “The Health Radar” with an artist named Lucia Garzón. She had inherited some recipes from her grandmother — homeopathic remedies using plants that are native to Colombia, where her grandmother was from. Her grandmother actually had a tool that was called the health radar. You sort of spun it and [it] had a viewfinder. If there was an ailment that you saw through one space and then it corresponded with a remedy, she wanted to recreate that.

Both of those works felt related and important to us because they were sharing some different types of ancestral knowledge and building upon that, and also was a way of documenting these [oral] storytelling practices.

In terms of works that we get excited about publishing, we’re really excited about functional forms. Taking familiar objects and print forms like placemats or menus and sometimes reworking them as a way to incorporate new information. [For example,] we had talked about how we create gatherings; often, we’ll take a broadside from an event and we make it into a place mat. 

Connie: I’d like to also talk about our “Annotated Readers,” which is something we published in 2021, as well. We had visited various archives and reprinted some organizational notes from queer and Asian social and political groups that were in operation between the 1970s and the early 2000s, and we reprinted them and then worked with people in our FORTUNE community to annotate them. And since then, we’ve been circulating them sort of slowly, for free, for lending periods. And right now, those Annotated Readers are on view at Asian Arts Initiative’s “Crescendo” exhibit until June 28th. 

For more updates about events, calls and programming from FORTUNE, sign up for their mailing list here.