Good Press
Independent Publisher and Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, U.K.
Q&A
Re-Flecting
Good Press Reading List
Good Press started in October 2011. For the first 4 years, we were based in Mono, a vegan cafe & restaurant which also houses Monorail Records. In 2015, we moved to a space around the corner. We were there for another 4 years and then moved into our current space at 32 St. Andrew’s Street. In that time, the amount of publications we have has ticked up and up as has what we’re able to facilitate (i.e. Sunday’s Print Service, Lunchtime, events, etc.)
Between 2011 and 2021, Good Press was run by a shifting group of volunteers. In October 2021 we formed a workers' cooperative. Good Press is currently managed by five directors who are a group of artists, designers, writers, musicians, and part-time workers in the labour market. Many of us are both or more of those things. All of us have a care and connection to publishing and facilitation.
2. What is the Ethos of Good Press, and has this changed over time?
In short, our ethos is our open submission policy. It functions in a practical sense but also embodies how we view or approach things - in a non-hierarchical, un-curated, and mutual way.
Our commitment to maintaining an open submission policy means that at Good Press, you will find projects which may not be given space in shops or galleries where the drive for profit dictates what is ‘marketable’ or ‘sellable’. In this way, a scope of material and practice lives side by side. Sometimes it has been referred to as ‘the only place I can put my shitty zines’. Sometimes, a ‘living archive’ of self-published printed matter from around the world. Through this, we hope to build a participatory mechanism in opposition to capitalism & the inequitable pursuit of profit.
Through an open submission policy with equitable representation (every publication is treated the same, is given the same space, and the same promotion), Good Press is committed to the value, vitality, and power of people independently representing themselves and their communities through the publications they create.
3. What role does collaboration and collectivity play within Good Press?
As a community-centred space, we hope to cultivate a positive exchange of ideas and practices. Find within these walls support, knowledge sharing, convivial co-learning, and a place to discuss ideas beyond the bounds of institutional structures. We hope that this system offers an entry point and opening in the social and participatory spirit of DIY practice. Inclusivity and accessibility are ingrained within the anti-hierarchical approach of open submission.
With having both a brick & mortar and a digital space for self- and independent publishing, we exist because of collaboration and collectively, as well as ingraining it within our ethos.
4. What role do you think Self-Publishing plays in Glasgows Cultural scene, and how has this changed over time?
Self-publishing has become a bit more viable and attractive as autonomy in general sadly seems to be fading. Self-representation is perhaps more important than ever, as is supporting physical media. The ability to have a direct process of idea>making>sharing is eternally exciting and kind of inherently resistant to fads, trends, and processes that involve any sort of bureaucracy. Self-publishing allows freedom and flexibility that resonates with plenty of folks in Glasgow, and it helps the growth of smaller, artist-run spaces and practices.
5. As this project is interested in practices that incorporate community, feminism, queerness, decolonialism, and cripness, what role do these themes play within Good Press, and how has their influence evolved?
Inclusivity has always been vital for us; it’s sort of baked into the foundation of what we do. By remaining open and accepting submissions of publications of all sorts, we’re hoping to create a space for publications that further independent and encompassing practices across a range of genres, mediums & forms. I will add that we’ll absolutely not stock anything that promotes or aims to uphold systems of racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, ableism, and classism.
We, in various shapes, naturally become a representation of the community. So the more diverse the field of folks making things, the more these themes appear in the shop. And as a worker’s cooperative run by majority women / queer people, it’s crucial that this reflection of the community at large takes place, and we’re happy to carve out a space for it.
6. What are the biggest obstacles Good Press faces currently to implement this framework, and what do you think might close these gaps?
The biggest obstacles tend to be time. It often feels there are not enough hours in the day to get everything done that we’d like to. We often feel like we’re spread in a million directions. We’re okay with this; it can just sort of slow things down a bit.
We’re also seeing a very horrifying trend of cultural spaces across Glasgow being evicted or having their rent multiplied. The fact that the city is purposefully killing off various important art spaces as well as many public (free) spaces in general is extremely and increasingly worrying for us, not only as tenants and a business, but as inhabitants and participants of the city itself.
7. Would you expand more on the Sunday's Print Service and Lunchtime Gallery and the role they play within Good Press?
Sundays began as a member’s print studio, so you could sign up, have an induction on the equipment, and then book out slots to use said equipment. The first lockdown squashed this, as well as just being forever pinched for space. We would like to bring that back in the future, though. But currently, it’s a commercial printer and bookmaking studio. We specialise in risograph printing as well as various binding and finishing options.
Lunchtime Gallery, similarly, has evolved. It began with exhibitions within and amongst the shop. Over time, it has moved to be a more roaming curatorial and publishing project.
In their own ways, both Sunday’s & Lunchtime play a large role in expanding our ability to foster and support the larger community of self-publishing and DIY activity.
Both are peers of the bookshop, all three of which fall under the greater Good Press umbrella.
8. How are access and care built into your programming and decision-making processes?
We take accessibility, within our space and on our website, very seriously. We will make mistakes, but we will always listen and (un/re) learn. Ultimately, we’re accountable to the community that sustains us by sending their books to stock, buying books, attending events, and being in conversation. We strive to be a space that is welcoming and inclusive of our visitors and communities' wants, requirements, and input.
9. How are decisions made about what gets platformed or stocked?
Because of the open submission policy, anyone can get in touch, and there is a very good chance we’ll stock it. We try to take as much as possible. Things in the shop that we get from distributors tend to be from independent publishers we’ve worked with in the past or who are publishing things that fit nicely within the shop. Sometimes, it’s books that we happen to see online, or someone may request something, and we’ll get a few copies. So it varies.
We hope that by selling publications which might otherwise have a limited audience and paying the makers for those publications fairly, their practice is sustained and encouraged to develop and grow. By proxy of a system which does not privilege the tastes of a small group of individuals who choose what publications are offered, those who use the space might encounter practices they did not assume to and find kinship in unthought places.
10. Why did you want to take part in this project?
It’s important to share what (little) knowledge we may have and our experience. It helps to demystify what we do, which is important to us, to not have running a bookshop/space being something that seems unattainable or hopeless.
Founded in 2011, Good Press emerged through a network of people, print culture, and community. Initially situated within Mono in Glasgow, the space existed alongside other forms of cultural circulation: listening, eating, publishing, gathering. Rather than establishing itself as a separate or autonomous institution, Good Press embedded itself within an already existing ecology of exchange.
Rather than a narrative of institutional growth, I became more interested in how continuity was maintained through ongoing transformation. In 2021, the shifting collective formalised into a workers’ cooperative. Yet despite this structural change, the ethos itself resisted fixity. As they reflected:
“Many of us are both or more of those things.”
Artist, designer, writer, musician, worker; these categories collapse into one another through lived experience. What emerges is a refusal of disciplinary coherence and a continual renegotiation of labour, authorship, and identity.
This tension between structure and openness appeared repeatedly throughout the conversation. Good Press describes its open submission policy not only as a practical mechanism, but as an ethos. I found myself returning to this duality. A policy that performs a politics. A structure that enacts a value system. To refuse traditional curatorial gatekeeping is not to abandon selection entirely, but to redistribute it differently. Their emphasis on being “non-hierarchical, un-curated, mutual” suggests not the absence of curation, but its reconfiguration into something more collective and diffuse.
One phrase particularly lingered with me:
“the only place I can put my shitty zines.”
The statement oscillates between humour, relief, and marginalisation. I kept thinking about the kinds of value being refused here, and the forms of legitimacy simultaneously being reconstructed. A living archive that makes space for the “shitty” destabilises conventional archival logic itself. It asks who determines cultural value, what is considered worthy of preservation, and whose work is permitted circulation.
Although capitalism is named directly throughout the conversation, I became more interested in the quieter construction of alternatives operating within its constraints. Good Press describes itself as:
“a participatory mechanism in opposition.”
This opposition does not exist outside systems of labour, rent, exhaustion, or precarity, but instead works through and against them simultaneously. The cooperative structure becomes a site of RE-distribution: of care, decision-making, labour, and responsibility.
Collaboration also emerged not simply as an activity, but as a condition of existence. As they explained:
“We exist because of collaboration.”
I found this framing particularly significant because collaboration is often positioned within curatorial discourse as supplementary or project-based. Here, however, it forms the foundation of the organisation itself. Good Press describes the space as one of “convivial co-learning,” a phrase that suggests softness and informality while also carrying a politics of collective knowledge production. Learning becomes something shared, reciprocal, and socially embedded rather than institutionally delivered.
This prompted me to think about access beyond physical accessibility alone. I became increasingly interested in epistemic access: what it means to enter a space where cultural knowledge is not pre-filtered, professionalised, or gatekept. Inclusivity is described as “ingrained,” yet also as something imperfect that requires continual “(un/re)learning.” The slash here feels important. Unlearning and relearning do not occur sequentially, but simultaneously.
Self-publishing similarly emerges as both practice and resistance. The directness of the process, idea, making, and sharing feels almost utopian when contrasted against the bureaucracy, trend cycles, and institutional barriers that often shape cultural production. To continue publishing outside dominant systems becomes a form of persistence.
Glasgow repeatedly surfaced throughout the conversation not simply as context, but as pressure. Rising rents, displacement, and the erosion of public cultural space position the city as an active force shaping the conditions of artistic survival. The description of cultural spaces being “killed off” reframes gentrification not as passive economic change, but as active destruction. Within this context, Good Press becomes a space of holding on and holding open simultaneously.
This adaptability is especially visible through projects such as Sunday’s Print Service and Lunchtime Gallery. Both began in one form, were interrupted through lockdowns, financial pressures, or spatial limitations, and later re-emerged differently. What interested me was that these shifts were never framed as failure. Instead, they reflected an ongoing process of RE-formatting: adjusting structures, scales, and modes of working in response to changing material conditions.
Toward the end of our correspondence, I found myself particularly drawn to their desire to “demystify” the running of cultural spaces. This felt deeply aligned with the wider concerns of my own research. To demystify curatorial practice is to RE-frame knowledge as collective and shareable rather than specialised or inaccessible. It resists the aura of expertise that often surrounds curatorial labour and instead positions cultural production as something participatory and attainable.
Ultimately, Good Press does not reject curation outright, but diffuses it across networks of collaboration, publishing, learning, and mutual support. Curating becomes less a singular authorial gesture and more an ongoing field of relations. Through practices of RE-valuing, RE-distribution, RE-formatting, and RE-learning, Good Press positions curatorial practice as something collective, adaptive, and continually in process.
- THE NATURAL ENEMIES OF BOOKS: A MESSY HISTORY OF WOMEN IN PRINTING AND TYPOGRAPHY by MMS (Eds.)
- OEI #86/87 PUBLISHING PRACTICES, PUBLISHING POETICS by Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg (Eds.)
- A SOMETHING ELSE READER by Dick Higgins (Ed.)
- FUTURE BOOK(S): SHARING IDEAS ON BOOKS AND (ART) PUBLISHING edited by Pia Pol and Astrid Vorstermans
- THE FLUXUS NEWSPAPER by Various Artists
- DON'T REST, NARRATE by Nicholas John Jones & Rachel Withers (Eds.)
- ACCESS QUESTIONS FOR SELF-PUBLISHING by Kaiya Waerea
- POST-DIGITAL PRINT: THE MUTATION OF PUBLISHING SINCE 1894 by Alessandro Ludovico
- SHELTER COOKBOOK by Leopold Banchini & Lukas Feireiss (Eds.)
- IN THE WAKE OF BLIND NAVIGATION: BOEKIE WOEKIE - BOOKS BY ARTISTS