ComeUnity Press began as an early-70s New York City working/living environment centered round a 24-hour open access print shop run by a gay anarchist collective (with more than a hint of hippyness) - its permanent members at the time were lin & mercure
there was a certain proud defiance in having a place like this, occupying the 6th floor of a run-down commercial building in Lower Manhattan, managing to survive in the very heart of the beast
most of the NYC movement groups and many local community organisations used ComeUnity at one time or another, regardless of any potential conflict of ideological beliefs, mainly because it offered free printing facilities - or rather it taught people how to print their own stuff and in return requested (hustled for) a contribution towards the running expenses - there was also a certain amount of editorial control exercised over what was printed, which sometimes led to long and complex discussions
everything printed there had to have a message on its cover along the lines of "this publication is free, but donations are invited to cover the cost" - all the official stationary (envelopes, notepaper, bills etc) was patterned with green marijuana leaves (the templates were created using real leaves taken from the plants growing up on the roof) - "rainbow" paper was often used, created by manually smearing different coloured inks directly onto the rollers of the off-set litho machines - constant rock music blared out from sound systems at either end of the building - and although food might sometimes have been in short supply, it was rare for there to be a lack of grass
the Press managed to continue operating like this until the late-70s (tho working times were nominally restricted to between 2pm and 2am after the first couple of years) - but eventually the common sense faction won out and commercial work was increasingly taken on to help pay bills
i don't know how long it survived, but thirty years later Come Unity Press is still listed in some US business directories under commercial printing services, with the same address, and even the same telephone number -
Come-Unity Press
13 East 17th Street Front
New York, NY 10003-1945
Phone - 001 (212) 675-3043
Fax - 001 (928) 758-1577
Mon, Oct 30, 2023
I crashed at the Come!Unity Press for several months in the early 1970s. Lin was very supportive and helped me “find myself” after I left home. I eventually decided against joining their collective, and became an apprentice locksmith instead, so I left their communal living space.
One interesting thing collectors of their printed materials might like to know is the way they applied ink to the rollers of their offset printing press resulted in mass producing unique printed products that had a slightly different set of foreground and background colors each time the rollers printed a new page. Each run had different colors and no flyer had exactly the same colors as the one printed before it.
They had a policy of recycling as much as they could, so they often reused paper by printing over old print jobs, which sometimes resulted in printed products with so much color that they were hard for color-blind people to read them. (The ADA would not be passed until decades later, but I'm sure Lin would have simply insisted on using different colors or trying out lighter and lighter background colors until the customer would give up and say it was legible!)
They liked that effect so much that they charged extra to print plain black ink because it meant cleaning all the colored ink off each of the machine's rollers before printing plain black and then after that print run when the next run would use colored ink.
Anyway, each of their print jobs was unique.