The Co-Founders of @press_sf
Are Reading Between The Times

Every few days or hours—there is no formula—PRESS will post a slideshow of scanned pages, from texts such as the illustrated Folk Tales from the Soviet Union, or a collection of impressive finger puppet portraits. Simultaneously, the husband-wife duo lists the physical copy on their site, usually priced around $20. A rare hardback of Ferragamo shoes might go for more, and a pamphlet on vegan dining in San Francisco will be less.

The books sell in about two minutes, co-founder Paulina Nassar tells me in a steady, passionate voice that travels via phone from Diamond Heights, San Francisco, where she lives with her partner in all senses, Nick Sarno, and their two kids. Even before quarantine, they spent “virtually every waking second together,” collaborating on PRESS for the past 10 years and the vendor fair West Coast Craft for the last seven. Sarno, who worked for a small press in Chicago before moving with Nassar to her hometown, sourced Japanese bookmaking supplies, Edward Gorey prints, the latest independent titles. Nassar was in charge of the vintage.

In the 80s and 90s, far from the extreme wealth of big tech that would soon define the region, Nassar discovered art at the Berkeley Museum and fell for fashion in the racks of Gunne Sax at Salvation Army. “When you grow up in California, especially anywhere near San Francisco and Berkeley, a kind of counterculture attitude is in your bones,” she says. Her taste coalesced into what it is now while working as a manager at Resurrection in New York, once hailed as “the holy grail of vintage stores” by Vogue. Between helping stylists outfit Rose McGowan in Gaultier, Resurrection sold books like Esprit’s highly sought-after design bibles (the wiggling ‘E’ in PRESS’s logo is an homage to the brand).

“They had an incredible archive, and they bought very, very carefully. The Norma Kamali sleeping bag coat, a certain time period of Roger Vivier shoes that took over the whole store…They just liked what they liked. I was really inspired by that,” Nassar says. “I used to think of used books as being a first-edition Dickens. They elevated books [at Resurrection], they treated them like art pieces, and it opened my eyes to how different books can be valuable in different ways.”

PRESS’s 2018 transition to selling through Instagram might seem antithetical to the founders’ homegrown interests. But ease of access is at the heart of craft, counterculture, and the World Wide Web. A mug made by hand is a portal into an artist’s world, like a vlog is a (cloudy, airbrushed) window into an influencer’s day-to-day.

Many of the @press_sf followers I met say that Nassar’s account is the only one they receive notifications for. “I love that the books are just one and done,” Nick Ledwitz, retail director of Ghostly International, says. He is part of PRESS’s core clientele: creative professionals looking for something they’ve never seen and don’t have the time to find themselves. “They’ve made a ritualistic practice,” Ledwitz tells me over the phone. The average person touches their phone 2,617 times in a day. Is it ritual?

Across the country from Nassar, Zenat Begum owns a radical Brooklyn coffee shop, bookstore and event space called Playground. She worked with PRESS to source some titles for her shop, and she continues to leave comments of appreciation for posts that give her pause. A few summers ago, Begum was living in San Francisco and she walked into PRESS’s (since-closed) physical space. “It was so well curated, I found a sense of home in this place where I was not a native,” Begum says. “I grew up in a Bengali household where creativity wasn’t something that was aimed at our futures… I chose the art world for myself, I learned about it from Black and brown perspectives. I knew that some of these more niche things were very white, and being able to surround myself with them made me feel powerful and like I had ownership.”PRESS has built a trust with their 70K followers; if a book is on the page, it’s special. Nassar hates the term “coffee table book” because the connotation is that you’ll never read it. Too big, too clunky, too authoritarian. She doesn’t care about a museum gift shop retrospective of Georgia O’Keeffe, but give her a book on Ghost Ranch and the clothes O’Keeffe wore to paint there, and she’d know just the person to pass it on to: one of the frequent Instagram DMers who never gets to the checkout screen in time, a purple lily as her avatar.When we post on Instagram, we don’t technically give up our ownership of the image, but we do concede to broad licensing rights. They have a lease on my portrait of my lover. But with physical shops closing — like Resurrection in August, like PRESS, like one-third of New York City’s small businesses — Begum wonders about kids finding the open door that says glassblowing is for them, too. Crucially, it’s not necessary to purchase something from PRESS to be exposed to the subcultures and genres they traffic in. A few scenes from Cannibal Soup: Tubbing with the Thompsons is enough to spark a deep dive into California decadence.In May, PRESS posted meditation mantras and marmalade recipes from counterculture text Living on the Earth: Celebrations, Storm Warnings, Formulas, Recipes, Rumors, and Country Dances Harvested by Alicia Bay Laurel, published in 1971. 1,443 likes. In seconds I found the author; she lives in Panama now, decades away from the girl in the Berkeley hills sketching shapes she saw on acid. “I have no idea how many people were affected by that book over the last 50 years,” Laurel says. “People write me letters saying, ‘I thought I was the only one who thought like this.’ There aren’t actually many thoughts in the book, it’s mostly how to make stuff. But the pictures tell a story: that it’s possible to live on very little and be very joyous.”I think @press_sf looks best on my laptop, the grid an expansive rainbow of colors in high-definition grain that the vintage filter can only imitate. It reminds me of Tumblr, where I catalogued what was beautiful at age 15; right now, the only thing I want to see on Instagram is Meryl Streep wearing a bodice and baseball hat, rehearsing for Shakespeare in the Park in 1978. I saw very few attempts at authorship or sourcing in the aughts, just 16,890 decontextualized reblogs.

Traditionally, the decorative sits at the bottom of the arts hierarchy because it is functional and feminine. The delineation between art and craft is clear when we wander a museum: what’s there, where is it located? An Instagram page is a virtual plane where disparate influences coexist, literally flattened and equalized, and a new generation of creatives bestows value by “liking” and buying. The Western devaluation of craft and folk arts has a race component too. Black creators of internet content are consistently denied credit, betrayed not only by systemic bias but the casual speed at which we share. PRESS has started donating proceeds from books like Who'd a Thought It: Improvisation in African-American Quiltmaking to Marcus Books in Oakland, the oldest independent Black bookstore in the country. On the PRESS Instagram, the tenth slide of every post is the book’s cover. It’s this step that acknowledges the original author’s labor and invites anyone looking to seek the title out themselves.

The phone in my hand is very little, yet contains an answer to my every question. I barely remember discovery without it. Nassar, who is 40, feels like she’s standing “between two times.” In one, if you were into a band, “you had to get your ass to Tower Records and find their B sides and read their zines.” In the other, information exchange is more democratic. “You could be anyone, anywhere, and you can get at the stuff that maybe you wouldn’t have had access to if you didn’t have the time, or the resources, or the friends who could clue you into what was cool.”

The exchange becomes overwhelming when we’re no longer seeking stuff out ourselves; instead, the algorithm provides us infinite content adjacent to what we already like. The shift happened in early 2016 when Instagram announced that feeds would be ordered to “show the moments we believe you will care about the most.”

Not that PRESS is exempt; tens of thousands found and followed them. (As soon as I began working on this story, their posts never left the top of my feed.) But the PRESS titles come from the culinary section of public library fairs or from Sunday garage sales in the Mission. Oakland artist Tracy Ren followed the account during lockdown, when opening Instagram took the place of opening random books in random library aisles. Lately she’s been seeking out illustrations of traditional Chinese architecture and furniture; without speaking the language fluently, visuals connect her to the place her family is from. “I can tell that [PRESS] is coming from a singular, specific perspective,” Ren says. And I can tell when Instagram accounts of pretty, vintage pictures foreground aesthetics without considering how they connect historically and culturally to the posts it’s wedged between.

“There’s something about the West that speaks to pioneering and wanting to be on the frontier. You see it in Silicon Valley and you see it in craft… I feel like it’s a natural swinging of the pendulum,” Nassar says. As much as PRESS looks back in time, the people behind it aren’t overly romantic about the days of dial-up. I suffer from this form of melancholy, and supposedly I’m Gen Z. But I’m learning to sit comfortably in the crawlspace between reality and the screen.

“We live in a postmodern world,” Nassar reminds me. “In a really great way, nothing is new.”

Greta Rainbow is a writer from Seattle, currently living in Brooklyn.