I arrive at the studio a little after 2 pm on Thursday, fresh from my silly internet job. I’m dressed warmly—the studio is in one of those old, industrial sort of spaces that are common in West Berkeley, and it gets cold in there this time of year. In the summer, it’s unbearably hot, and I can often feel sweat dripping down my back if I’m working at the press upstairs.
The atmosphere is a calm before the storm. The piles of prints that cover every surface are neat now, but by the end of the first hour they will be in absolute chaos. There are a number of volunteers like me milling around—it’s our job to make sure the piles stay neat, and that stray prints find their way back to where they came from. I do a quick lap, trying to note items I might want to return to: a calendar for my house, a patch for a friend. I run into people I know from the studio, and we say hi, comment on the chaos, chat about what we’ve been working on, what we want to buy.
This is my second year volunteering at the sale, and today I want to work as a ticket writer. It’s my favorite job—I get to go through everyone’s piles of prints and see what they’ve chosen, noting each print and its price so they can be tallied and the funds can make their way back to the correct artists. I love going through the piles—each one is a little snapshot of someone’s world. Their interests, their politics. Their strategy: are they buying a ton of prints that are all cheap, or just one or two really expensive ones? What colors they are drawn to—reds, greens, Riso-neon pinks? Are they buying a matching print for their partner?
Each print gets logged on a ticket, where I write down its unique code and price. Each ticket sheet has about ten entries—last year, the biggest stack I handled was five tickets long. The stack belonged to a woman who wore a massive calf-length fur coat that was black and white spotted and looked sort of like a campy, furry cow. I’m not the cashier responsible for adding it all up, but as her ticket entries mounted, I could tell her total was going to come out to well over $2,000.
“These are so nice! Are they going to be gifts?” I asked, by way of making conversation. Gazing down at me, perched on my stool, she made a face. “Oh no, they’re all for me,” she said, with an air of finality. I thought about the sheer amount she would have to spend on frames in order to display them all. God knows this is a woman who frames her art.
Part of what I love about the prints sale is that, unlike a zine fest or art market, I’m not specifically responsible for selling my work—rather than having to actively make small talk and peddle my wares, I can sit back and just watch people be drawn to what they’re drawn to. There are thousands of prints at the sale each year, from hundreds of artists. Some make a significant chunk of their income from the sale, while others, like me, are artists in the spare cracks of time their day jobs afford. But at the print sale, all are equal—everything sprawled out side by side on the big table.
As a ticket writer, I also write down people’s names, which are attached to their piles on a Post-it note (things can get lost in the chaos of the checkout line, and it’s nice to know what pile belongs to who). This means I do a lot of asking how names are spelled—is that Sarah with an H? Tory or Tori? Someone with the name Bridge comes down my line. Though I’ve said it many times today, the phrase “How do you spell that” suddenly deserts my head, and I freeze. “Like… the… infrastructure?” I finally ask, after about a five second pause. I get a double take—and then a smile. “Yeah, I guess you could say that!”
The flow of people waxes and wanes throughout the afternoon and into the evening. I take a long break to stand outside and chat with some friends. I see friends of my exes and exes of my friends and people I ran cross country with in high school. Despite the chaotic atmosphere—at times there are so many packed into the space that the flow of people slows to a halt—everyone seems to be in a good mood, which multiple people remark on. “Because everyone here is an artist, or really loves art… Everyone is pretty chill, I guess,” someone speculates. This seems to be the general consensus. Flipping through a pile, I find a print that I made, which feels like running into a friend on BART: the initial startle, then fond recognition. There you go, out into the world, to a wall somewhere, or a flat file under someone’s bed.
I am in the flow state. I am one with the ticket. I can have a full conversation with whoever I’m checking out while also writing down all their codes and prices. Before I know it, the doors have closed, and the final piles are making their way down the line. I dip out a little early—I’ve been here nearly 7 hours and I have a friend’s dinner that I’m already late to. Outside it’s colder than I expect; the studio has become warm from 7 hours of bodies huddled together. Sometimes when I’m at the press, churning out prints, I wonder if there’s any point in putting more pieces of paper out into a world that already has so many.
But people love them enough to stand in the cold for an hour in a line that wraps around the block. They love them enough to cram into a cramped studio space and then stand in another line so they can spend hundreds of dollars. All for a few pieces of paper.
