re- word-forming element meaning "back, back from, back to the original place;" also "again, anew, once more," also conveying the notion of "undoing" or "backward," etc., c. 1200, from Old French re- and directly from Latin re- an inseparable prefix meaning "again; back; anew, against."
I never used to reprint artist books, zines, and publications. You might think this derived from traditional fine press tutelage: reprinting a letterpress printed book for which you’ve already distributed the type is a massive, time-consuming undertaking, and besides, the book established its value and status through being “limited.” Why would you reprint? But before my fine press training, my first seven years of publishing were zines. And when each issue went out of print, it never occurred to me to reprint them. When I was publishing zines in the 90s, zines were periodicals; each issue was tied to a particular moment. There was always a new issue. It was an ongoing practice. For seven years I made a new zine every three months, the date on the cover associated with the season (“Fall 1995”). Publishing was always moving forward, not retracing steps, not the “again; back; anew” of reprinting.
Certainly that sounds more interesting, to keep making new things, rather than remaking the old? As Marc Fischer of Temporary Services / Half Letter Press / Public Collectors recently wrote:
“In some ways publishing, and being available to others through publishing, has become how I teach these days. Keeping the old stuff in print is an impossible task....It’s not that I want things to be scarce; it’s that it’s not always cost-effective or storage-effective to make a ton of everything and I’m always looking to balance the labor of making and shipping these publications with the desire to write and design and research the next thing.” – Marc Fischer, April 15, 2026 Public Collectors newsletter
I had been publishing for 25 years before I decided to reprint something. And now, it seems to me, I’m reprinting all the time. Perhaps it is that part of my “desire to write and design and research” is already channeled into a long-term book project that I have been working on since 2021. Reprinting in-demand titles offers certainty; a way to maintain my hands-on studio practice while I toil intangibly. What I reprint is most often authored by other women: overlooked work from feminist archives (I call it the Efemmera Reissue series, visible here). I feel a responsibility to this material. It is important. I am in service to it. Its audience keeps expanding, due to the ubiquity of art book fairs: there are many opportunities for new readers to engage with this work. And I reissued it in the first place to facilitate these encounters. So why stop?
A publication from the past is tied to the present by its relevance. Some topics are aligned with specific moments at the time of their reprinting: I discovered and decided to reissue the first newsletter of the Cassandra Radical Feminist Nurses Network (1984) during COVID. I have now reprinted it three times. The first time was after the Dobbs decision, when imagining a national network of Radical Feminist Nurses conjured a United States with reproductive rights for all. The second time was because it was the second Trump presidency. And the third time, just a few months ago, I reprinted it again because: it keeps selling out, stockists inquire about reordering it, the facial expression across the art book fair table when a browser reads the title out loud radical feminist nurses network, wow. That is affirmation of why I reissued it. And that is why I keep reprinting it.
Making a publication for the first time—even when it is a reissue, as is the case with the Efemmera series, when I am collaborating with decisions made by other people long in the past—is exciting, thrilling. A tremendous scope of choices and problem solving, researching and writing; framing context; reaching out to the original authors; testing materials; seeing the artifact reborn in the present moment.
But as you might imagine, the act of reprinting holds little excitement. Its challenges are of the technical rather than the artistic kind. Therein lies the challenge of how to make something uninteresting, interesting by paying attention to it. So in my next post, a diary of paying attention to reprinting.
Emily Larned has been printing and publishing as an artistic practice since 1993. Her artist publications are collected by over 90 institutions internationally. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she will serve as Director of Graduate Studies commencing in fall 2026.
