A Working Relationship: Choosing a Printer, Part 1
by Silvia Passiflora, Editor | Scriptaluna
May 31, 2026
There is a printer not far from a bookstore I love. I drove past it more than once before I ever walked in. The logic was simple and felt good: local, independent, the kind of place that might care about a poetry collection the way I cared about it. I told myself the extra cost — because I knew there would be one — was worth it. No shipping wait. No tracking number refreshed at midnight. I would pick the books up myself, carry them out the door, and maybe walk to my bookstore.
That was the version I wanted.
I walked in. I explained the project. They said they would follow up with a quote. I waited. I followed up. I waited again. I called.
Nothing.
I tried other printers. One had stellar reviews and picked up the phone on the first ring — no website calculator, everything quoted personally, which felt like attention. But their minimum was fifty copies, which lowered the per-unit price and raised everything else: the risk, the storage, the cash out of pocket before a single book had sold. Another quoted beautifully and then I learned they don't actually print in-house. The work goes somewhere else. The local part was a storefront.
At some point the romantic version of this ran out of road.
I found Mixam through research. I ran the numbers, read the specs, looked at the paper options, and submitted the files. The order confirmed. The proof arrived. The quality was right. Twenty first-edition copies of Aurora Cantus will be delivered for $113.70.
No one will hand them to me across a counter. There is no team in the way I imagined it — no one on the other side of the glass who knows the title, who watched the pages come off the press. What there is: a printer that answered, a process that worked, and a book that will exist on June 19th.
I still believe in local. I still believe the counter and the handshake matter, that there is something a neighborhood printer offers that a fulfillment warehouse cannot. I did not stop believing it. I just couldn't find it this time.
Sometimes the work needs a partner who shows up. That's not a small thing. It turned out to be the only thing.
A full breakdown of quotes, specs, and printers — with names and numbers — follows in Part 2.
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