Fun, if Useful: Pittsburgh’s Almost Perfect Press

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Brown paper is generous. Underneath its fibers might exist a wanted gift, a needed component, or an unexpected explosive. It both wraps a deli sandwich and forms the bag into which the sandwich is placed. Multiple layers of brown paper create the cardstock of mailing envelopes. Pleated and stacked, it becomes cardboard. When suitably used, brown paper is an emblem of recycling. Almost never the point but beside the point, around the point, underneath the point, brown paper is dutiful and good on earth. Brown paper takes credit for none of this. The brown bag lunch is, perhaps, the only occasion in which brown paper’s role is nominally celebrated.

A folded sheet of brown paper forms the cover for each copy of Almost Perfect Press’s nine titles. Founded in 2023 by Pittsburgh-based artist Brent Nakamoto, APP is a “micro press” whose output ranges from new speculative sci-fi to Zen Buddhist classics. Book pages are printed in a local shop before Nakamoto himself slices, stitches, and glues them into unassuming codices of roughly forty pages. In a 2025 short film by David Bernabo, Nakamoto describes the resulting books as “storage and sharing devices.” Behind his worktable is a black-and-white laser printed image of Elmo taped to the wall. Though APP has yet to partner with the acclaimed Muppet, one of Elmo’s own book titles suggests an affinity: Elmo Is Mindful. 

Book readership continues to plummet in the United States (allegedly), but writership seems to grow without limit. The RuPauls and Britney Spearses of the world write memoir after memoir, readily converting one genre of fame into another. (The literary import of these volumes is hard to measure, though the audiobook recording of The Woman in Me featuring Michelle Williams is a triumph.) Whatever the merits of these texts, the book form unlocks a celeb achievement, adding “author” to the Wikipedia biography. A book can even be a consolation prize: Kamala Harris may have lost the election, but she won a book deal. Unencumbered by the requirements of office, she can now flit about the country, reminding us that she failed to take the presidency for several reasons—none of which were her refusal to demand an end to the genocide in Palestine. It almost doesn’t matter if we read these books or not, so long as they slingshot the newly printed author to those places beyond the book: the podcast circuit, the TikTok drama factory, the New York Times opinion page. The book is useful both as a commodity, and as a means to an end. 

Usefulness is a trouble. We are all, at this time, so useful. Each time we open an app on our phones, we generate data that is converted into a commodity, that is then sold and traded and studied and reflected upon. In our most broken moments, we stare into our devices to escape grief and heartbreak through a sort of hypno-dissociation. Each finger swipe keeping us together doubles as an impassive dispatch to some algo-data-crypto-mish-mash somewhere out there. The mish-mash predicts whose suffering might entertain us, might distract us from our own. Instagram regularly offers me the reels of a woman in the grip of schizo-paranoid delusions. She believes she is persecuted, physically and spiritually, by the rich and powerful. (There is always something a little bit true inside a delusion, I suppose.) Her videos have tens of comments, hundreds of likes, from people pretending to agree with her, as though she were just telling a funny story. As though her narrative about Hollywood stars attacking her spiritual essence were not wholly and totally real to her, a terrifying state. And all this is useful for social media companies, their advertisers, and their investors. In an era of social media memorials, we are useful even unto and beyond death. Books and their authors are by no means separate from this. Most publishers encourage authors to generate, in addition to an actual fucking book, “content”: videos of the author giving reheated writing advice, videos of the author pretending to be surprised by their own book cover, videos of authors telling you how to be your most authentic and truthful self, despite the author having never met you at all. To publish the book you wish to publish, you must become useful. It is obviously perverse to evoke Marina Abramović here, but why not: Books must be useful; author must be useful. 

Usefulness is a long-running consideration in Nakamoto’s art practice, though his usefulness is not defined by exploitation and profit. Prior to his work with APP, Nakamoto centered his practice on painting, but felt dissatisfied with the art market’s focus on commodity exchange, as well as the political inertness of the medium: “I was growing tired, feeling like the work that I was making could only exist as something to be bought and displayed and looked at.” A painting, finished and hanging on a wall, is not an art form with which most people feel comfortable engaging. For many, a painting simply does not indicate a course of action or a politics of time. They may find some inspiration or meaning in the work, but—sans didactic use of words—they are unlikely to find in it a prompt for doing beyond seeing. And how could they? We barely look at paintings. Even in a museum context, the average visitor views a work of art for thirty-ish seconds. When painting literacy is in the gutter, when we’re attuned to half-minute videos of each other being sold our selves, how can we be expected to engage with a static work of art unless it beats us over the head with a wordy message?

What Nakamoto sought was not a longer timespan in which a viewer might observe or consider his work, but rather the viewer’s cessation of solely viewing—for the them to get in on the fun. For some time, he had been hand-binding journals for himself and binding printed PDFs for reading. When friends expressed interest in buying journals from Nakamoto, he realized the book might be an object-form through which viewers could engage their own agency. During his undergraduate years, Nakamoto had studied the creation of art books—book objects that complicate a text’s primacy by engaging the material, geometrical, and kinetic possibilities of a book. Not every art book is a commodity, but many art books are undeniably precious objects: limited in number, expertly crafted by hand, and sensitive to destruction by natural or human forces. While Nakamoto admired the craftspersonship of beautiful art books, he felt they were limited much like a painting: aesthetic objects existing outside of dialogue, caught in cycles of private property collecting. The skills utilized in art book making, however, were another matter: “I wanted to make books that were visibly handmade, which made people think about books differently, realize that they can be made by hand, that they could make a book by hand. I’m publishing books for people to buy, but I’m also secretly hoping that the press might inspire someone to start making books of their own.” As an example of this approach, Nakamoto will soon lead a small bookbinding workshop at local art gallery Bunker Projects, where each attendee will stitch together their own copy of an APP title. The pages and materials will be provided free of cost, allowing everyone to focus on the time and effort toward creation, rather than getting a commodified leisure-time experience. 

There are many ways to spend time, to take action, but for Nakamoto, who has practiced Zen Buddhism for the past ten years, time and action are elements of life to which we ought to be attentive: “I was thinking a lot about artworks with a more functional purpose, objects made for religious or ritual practice.” Bookmaking, in this way of thinking, is a ritual act—something which becomes meaningful in its directedness, perhaps its repetition. This is not a romantic ritual but a realistic one. Inevitably, “everything [in the world] leaks in.” Nakamoto seeks to find beauty in these leaks. Being attentive to his actions, to his use of time, becomes an active task in this way. This attentiveness is what he hopes others might find in bookbinding. As the name of the press might suggest, it’s not a perfect situation. The repetitive action of slicing pages and stitching signatures—he binds roughly ten books in one hour—has resulted in a shoulder injury. 

Each APP title costs $20—a reasonable price, if perhaps a tad higher than your average chapbook. While APP emerges from a specific anti-capitalist set of principles, the project isn’t one of economic self-sacrifice. Nakamoto, a working artist, has to recoup the cost of materials, and APP pays royalties to its authors. There is a tension between Nakamoto’s express wish—to escape the commercialism of the art world—and APP’s status as another small arts venture that moves money around. This is by no means a criticism, but the reality of making art in a country without arts funding. It costs something to make something, and it costs something to make a life.

To date, Almost Perfect Press’s author list is a short list of mostly local writers: Varun Navindran, SJ Powell, Catherine Gammon, Ari Moline, and Nakamoto himself. Alongside these single-author volumes are collected writings in support of Palestinian liberation and in celebration of local art exhibitions. APP isn’t a Pittsburgh-only club, but Nakamoto isn’t in a rush to collect manuscripts from other cities: “So much of the art world values this very metropolitan idea of connecting with people from all over the world. There’s this (I think very false) idea that working with the ‘best’ artists and writers means that you need to look everywhere.” Nakamoto welcomes submissions to the press, but prioritizes those that require minimal editing and which align with the ethos of the press—usefulness or, in another word, fun.

No thesaurus lists “fun” as a synonym for “useful,” but APP perhaps challenges this disconnect. Nakamoto has fun binding each book by hand, has fun working with authors and reading their manuscripts. He has fun attending book and zine events where he sells copies of APP titles. It is fun to move toward what he wants: a project that encourages people to engage time and materiality, to print and bind their own sorts of books. In that sense, the action of making a book is useful to him. But, importantly, reaching some kind of goal, some kind of widespread acceptance of his ideas, isn’t what determines the meaningfulness of all that fun. The fun doesn’t need to cohere into a final point in order to be “successful.” This is distinct from the approach some academics take, winding fun into work, writing about play’s importance for productivity. This way of thinking about fun treats it as a preparatory task. Fun, they would have it, gets us ready for the “real work.” Fun here is a tool rather than a thing unto itself: play is work and work is play. Fun of this sort does not overrun the bounds of productivity or get in the way of extracting or making something extractable. 

The association between fun and usefulness that might be glimpsed through Almost Perfect Press, however, is something else. It suggests that an infinite means is no less desirable than prolific ends. Put another way, a life of arriving is not superior to a life of being en route. Nakamoto’s Buddhism-inspired approach to usefulness and fun makes APP an interesting departure from the teleology of books on the commercial market. Titles are not investments to be recouped, or successes authors owe to their publishers. Instead, each copy of an APP book is something useful but impractical, something beautiful, something fun.