They Opened an Independent Bookstore That's Always Ready to Close | 100 People With Ideas

That's how independent publishing works — you can start small, put something out into the world, and then find the balance in between.

"I hear there's a band called 'We Break Up Tomorrow' — ha. Anyway, tomorrow hasn't come yet, so come to the opening and have some fun first." That is what Yiwan wrote on WeChat Moments the day before Closing Ceremony, an independent bookstore, opened.

The new store is tucked inside a residential compound on Middle Urumqi Road in Shanghai. You have to wind through several lanes to find it; a poster for the opening is taped to an unremarkable rusted iron gate. The building is a piece of historic old-Shanghai architecture, and government repair work has left scaffolding all around the store. The courtyard had not been tidied up, and the store's bare-bones fit-out was nothing like the usual "arts venue" — yet the small space was packed, and young people with nowhere left to stand had spilled out the door.

Closing Ceremony

The bookstore was founded by Xiaopeng and Yiwan. Before this, Xiaopeng was an editor at a local Shanghai weekly; Yiwan, who moved from Beijing to Shanghai, also worked in media. Now the two of them run a studio called Same Studio and a bookstore called Closing Ceremony.

Same Studio was set up in 2013. Studio is a grand word for what is really just the two of them. Xiaopeng and Yiwan met through an interview and became friends over a shared love of photography and books. The thinking at the time ran roughly: "We've got photos sitting around that we've never done anything with — why not make a zine?" Same Studio's first book, Same Paper: Free Park, came out of that.

Neither had any publishing experience, and they ran into layout and printing problems, but looking back they think those were small things, easily solved. As Xiaopeng puts it: "We had steady incomes, so spending 10,000 or 20,000 yuan on something we loved doing felt like no pressure at all." Because both had full-time jobs, though, Free Park went through a year of editing and re-editing before it went to print.

The first run was 300 copies, more than half of them sold within a month. "You have no idea where the buyers come from — from the shipping addresses, one was even some township down in Yunnan." Apart from posting on Weibo, Yiwan says, they promoted the book nowhere else.

The customers of independent bookstores are a niche group, he believes, but a group big enough to absorb what the two of them make and sell; the point is to give those people time to find you. As for the proposition that "print is dying," Yiwan finds it a very stock way of putting things: "You can say an economic downturn affects independent publishing. But the decline of print media doesn't have much to do with what we do."

With that first success behind them, they soon made several more books.

Food Issue, made with the photographer Ren Hang, looked erotic enough that one print shop after another turned it down; in the end the only way through was to cover the sensitive parts of the images with adhesive stickers, pieced on by hand. Daddy and Son, reprinted this June, came from Xiaopeng searching the keywords "daddy" and "son" separately and re-editing the images the web returned. There is also a photo book called Lifestyle: to carry the idea of one shared world, the pictures are interleaved at random with no photographer credited. They come not only from Xiaopeng and Yiwan but from photographers of different backgrounds — a Chinese person living in Canada, a foreigner living in Beijing.

Some of the pictures in the book are stills pulled from video.

These publications are plainly no longer simple books or photo albums; they are closer to a form of art. Xiaopeng and Yiwan call them "artist's books." But do independent magazines and niche publications have to be artist's books? Yiwan doubts it.

"Independent publishing is only a way of making things — in theory there's no limit on subject matter. It's just that covering the same topics mainstream publishers already cover seems pointless, since independent publishing takes so much more effort." The most interesting part of the work, Yiwan thinks, is that everyone makes what their own taste tells them to.

Jiazazhi《假杂志》, which has made something of a name for itself, collects one particular kind of photography and binds it into books to sell. Banana Fish Bookstore (banana-fish) tends to make its books with Risograph printing. Rosabooks, in Chengdu, prefers to tell stories about how people on the other side of the world live.

What Xiaopeng and Yiwan like is different again. They want to carry across avant-garde visual forms — but "avant-garde" here does not mean eye-catching in the usual sense. Quite the opposite: they love work that is restrained and understated.

To explain what he meant by restraint, Xiaopeng picked up two books from the London publisher MACK and told me their stories and their features. He stressed the details of the binding: the typeface and position of the page numbers, the white space between images, the texture of the paper. One book about discarded objects used thin, light stock, its pictures piled up as messily as thrown-out trash; another, about moving house, felt extremely heavy, calling to mind the material of a cardboard box.

"They used a heavy cardboard stock, I think, to fit the idea of the boxes you use when you move."

"A good independent publication makes you feel the artist came to the publisher and worked through the design and the layout with the editor, again and again — that the book is the artist's own work."

Set against the books Chinese independent bookstores publish themselves, the biggest problem, they think, is the absence of any editorial hand. "Usually it's just contacting an artist and laying out the work they've picked into a book. There's none of the publisher's own thinking in it."

For Food Issue, made with Ren Hang, Xiaopeng and Yiwan chose photographs to do with "feet" or "food" out of Ren Hang's large body of work and re-edited them along their own lines. Since they were friends, the way they got him to agree amounted to "half coaxing, half tricking him."

Closing Ceremony now carries more than 120 titles. Apart from the four they printed themselves, all of it was lined up in the three months before the store opened: reading through the pages of foreign independent publishers, estimating how many copies to order at a time, then sending each publisher a list of the titles they liked along with information about Same Studio.

They also swap and sell books with independent bookstores abroad, which are often independent publishers themselves. Traveling in New York, Xiaopeng took a few of his own publications to Printed Matter, the city's largest independent bookstore, showed them to the manager and came away with a deal.

"We only pick what we like ourselves. The moment there's something about a book we don't like, we drop it." Readers who buy from them have suggested adding music, architecture, even books from Magnum Photos, and the two will not give an inch. "If you know even a little about independent publishing, Magnum is the first thing you rule out," Xiaopeng said, sounding slightly resigned.

The best sellers in the two days since the opening were also the ones whose taste leaned — Xiaopeng used the word "old-school," which Yiwan corrected to "mainstream." Readers want a bright, handsome style, or a visual experience that looks cool at first glance. That sits some way from what the two of them like, but they said that from now on, when choosing what to stock, they would try to give some weight to how good a cover looks.

This book is Tokyo Parrots, one of the best sellers in the two days since the opening.

Three groups of visitors came by during the interview, all of them friends or friends of friends. Yiwan told me the store opens only on weekends for now, so anyone who wants to come at another time has to make an appointment. In whatever time is left over, the two are not only preparing the next issue of Same Paper but also taking freelance jobs on the side — a supplement for LEAP, say, or clothing shoots for Zuczug.

This touches one of the biggest problems in running an independent bookstore: money. (The other is the publication license, a problem particular to China.) It reminded me of a paid event Banana Fish Bookstore held recently, teaching people to make Risograph zines at 900 yuan a head. Yiwan and Xiaopeng plainly do not want to work that way, but they were candid about the financial pressure they are under — that independent magazines don't make money is by now common knowledge.

"But if we don't quit our jobs, this will always stay where it is. It's hard to make any real progress." For the moment their collaborations with artists also run on a "books back" basis: they print a hundred copies and give the artist twenty or thirty to do with as they please.

"Lifestyles," a small photography show held last year at the Shanghai branch of Triple-Major.

The well-known independent publishers abroad — Printed Matter in New York, for instance — have a sprawling web of foundations and arts institutions behind them, while Karma and Dashwood, which have always stayed small, still have a large base of regular customers thanks to America's deep zine culture. "In a city like New York, as long as you can do the work, there are resources of every kind to support you." In China, by comparison, the two have to worry not only about the publication license and the limits on what may be printed, but about the consumer environment and readers' taste.

"But that's how independent publishing works — you can start small, put something out into the world, and then find the balance in between." Yiwan and Xiaopeng are at ease with that. Just like the name of their bookstore, they are giving it everything they have, while staying ready at any moment to close.