Radical independent publisher PM Press has bought a 17,000-square-foot warehouse in Binghamton, N.Y., and no longer calls Oakland, Calif., its home base. As of February, PM had shifted most shipping and receiving to its spacious new digs, while retaining its much smaller rented warehouse and one staffer in the Bay Area. With the warehouse purchase, “we now owe the bank half a million dollars,” said PM publisher Ramsey Kanaan, whose long-term plans include opening a bookstore in nearby Ithaca, N.Y. “Having our own functioning warehouse is the bedrock, because it means we can hold events, do Kickstarter fulfillments” for advance sales and publicity, and grow the company.

Kanaan explained that PM relies on “a dual track or inside/outside sales strategy,” working with distributor PGW inside the book trade while also having a large presence in other channels. “For instance, we have our own mail order operation, and we don’t have Ingram fulfill our mail order.” Furthermore, in 2019, Kanaan estimated PM attended 500 events, from book fairs and academic conferences to band tours, craft fairs, and political protests. “Anywhere we could set up a table or tent, we were there,” he added.

Kanaan founded PM in 2007, and the press employs 13 staffers “scattered around the globe.” A decade ago, he said, PM could count on a “critical mass of personnel in the Bay Area.” Now, costs of living plus the complications of Covid have made the Oakland headquarters unsustainable. “We tried to hire more people to work in the warehouse, and nobody could afford to live in the Bay Area,” Kanaan said. “We’re not paying tech wages. Until recently, I was going into the old warehouse, packing boxes, because things were going nuts, and six other PMers would be flying in to help.”

When Covid happened, “we did better than most,” Kanaan noted, “because we weren’t relying entirely on the book trade. Once we got over the initial shock, we got PPP loans and weathered the storm.”

PM already had a robust Friends of PM subscription program in place, and the service tripled to approximately 950 subscribers during the pandemic. Increased mail orders brought an “unexpected windfall of profitability,” Kanaan said. “I feel lucky in a karmic way. Your Amazons and Elon Musks benefit from every disaster, but for us that has been the silver lining to what has been an utter nightmare.”

Kanaan discovered that PM was “so successful in a commercial sense during Covid that a bank would give us a loan.” He looked into a change of venue, and his connections in Upstate New York pointed him toward Binghamton. “Binghamton for better or worse is your typical deindustrialized city,” he explained. “We had our pick of warehouses. Not all were suitable, but the one we ended up with is fantastic: empty for several years, with roll-up doors, loading docks, and palette racks.”

PM has just under 600 books in print, and publishes 35–40 new titles per year. Kanaan “trucked basically everything” cross-country in full container loads, bringing “a quarter of a million books” into the warehouse, with room left to expand. New hires Andy Pragacz and Eriksen Goetz helped Kanaan get the space up and running, with future thoughts of hosting events on site.

For now, Kanaan will focus on the practical matter of “getting books in front of the eyeballs of readers.” He sees 2022 as a watershed moment for radical publishers, and he stated unequivocally that “the George Floyd uprisings saved publishing,” adding, “That was the biggest social movement America has ever seen, and those were the books that saved the industry.” PM’s role must be “to feed into those social movements, with intellectual ideas and in some cases practical tools, to map out strategies and visions.”

To that end, in August, PM will publish a compendium of radical writing, The George Floyd Uprising, edited by the anonymous collective known as Vortex Group.