Publishing Provocative Ideas
Colin Beckhorn amplifies alt voices by publishing the provocative
Story and photos by DuPree Nugent
Posters promoting “SH’BANG A FESTIVAL OF IDEAS” from 2024. The festival, held at Lookout Arts Quarry, hosts a number of musical acts booked and managed by Beckhorn.
Upon arriving at Lookout Arts Quarry, the front of a blue sheet metal structure came into sight. A nude figure with an unraveling head was painted on the white door. In the vicinity stood a bulletin board pinned with collage-style posters promoting “SH’BANG A FESTIVAL OF IDEAS,” written with wavy texts. Around the jungle of artwork and vegetation, an air of calm encircles the quarry, save for the occasional car driving along the highway.
It is here among the art and foliage where Cullen Beckhorn lives and works with a community of artists, hosting and booking performances for the ‘Sh’bang Festival’, a three-day festival held during Labor Day.
Inside Beckhorn’s studio, where he works as editor of his independent publishing platform Neoglyphic Media, is a display of self-published zines and colorful, surreal posters strewn along the walls promoting events at the Alternative Library, a former project that Beckhorn founded and directed, which saw a number of locations while it was active.
The Alternative Library was a project that distributed literature from small, lesser-known publishers as well as works from independent and local artists. The books distributed covered a wide variety of topics and genres that a typical library might not hold. Beckhorn envisioned the Alternative Library based on values and ethics that he developed through his own reading and self-education, which, for Beckhorn, had logically pointed toward anarchist values.
“It didn't start as an expressly political project. It functioned as a political and social experiment while it was existing, and that was necessarily the anarchistic value system that it was built on,” Beckhorn said.
Zines on display inside Beckhorn’s studio.
Beckhorn’s view on anarchism as a completely voluntary, non-hierarchical model also acted as the basis for the Alternative Library’s structure and ethics.
“I believe that consensual relationships and decision making is the best model, and that all governments essentially have some form of coerced hierarchy,” Beckhorn said.
He had been developing the idea while living a self-described “vagrant lifestyle” as a performance artist in Bellingham after dropping out of college. As a multi-instrumental musician, Beckhorn played with different groups in a range of genres. Initially, he never imagined himself running an alternative library and tried to pitch the idea to others.
“No one really thought it was as cool as I did, I guess,” Beckhorn joked.
An unexpected turn came when Beckhorn’s car and belongings were stolen, putting a brief halt to his wayfaring lifestyle, and marking the beginning of him seriously reassessing what he wanted to do with his life.
Beckhorn started to weigh options that would benefit him and his community. Beckhorn decided that starting an alternative library weighed most positively in both of these areas.
As an avid comic reader, he was also prompted by his dissatisfaction with the Bellingham art scene. He felt there was a lack of comics being sold or distributed in libraries that he was interested in: unconventional, non-superhero works mostly coming out of European and Asian countries that were more artistically and narratively complex.
“People love that stuff,” Beckhorn said. “Not everyone wants to read masculine power fantasies. People love to be challenged and have different kinds of stories.”
Cullen Beckhorn’s personal comic collection above his desk. Many of these comics influenced Beckhorn’s tastes and interests.
The Alternative Library’s collection started as a project Beckhorn ran by himself in his home with just a three-ring binder to log patron and book information. The Library’s collection grew from the comic books that Beckhorn cared about to books covering a multitude of topics ranging from radical politics to spirituality.
“It evolved through relationships with the people who were using it and expressing other aspects of counterculture or leaning into other avenues of art,” Beckhorn said.
With a rapidly growing collection and an increase in visitors, running the library solo was no longer an option.
“It was doing so many things that it became really hard for it to scale back at all,” Beckhorn said.
To accommodate the growth, the library moved to various locations around Bellingham, including North Forest Street and Railroad Avenue. In 2015, the Alternative Library eventually ended up in the Karate Church on East Maple Street.
Beckhorn also drew on his background as a musician and began to host events showcasing other musicians and performance artists. Along with expanding the number of titles, the Alternative Library began to publish and distribute works from independent artists.
“It just makes sense that a space that traffics in independent publishing, eventually becomes a space that supports independently publishing the people who are connected to it,” Beckhorn said.
The Karate Church was intended to be the forever home of the Alternative Library, but in 2019, they received a notice to vacate after the departure of one of their longtime volunteers and landlord. The collection is now in a storage unit in Bellingham, and, with the size of the collection, Beckhorn said that he doesn’t have the energy to start it again by himself.
“Creating another incarnation of the alternative library at this point would require finding a space that could adequately house it, as well as a community of involved people,” Beckhorn said, “My time of just being able to be a maniac and run that by myself is over.”
Beckhorn feels that since closing the library, he has been able to focus on personal projects like planning events and exhibitions in Seattle, Vancouver, B.C. and Portland, as well as publishing the works of independent artists through Neoglyphic Media.
“I'm very interested in image-based storytelling and more playful ways of going about that or things that are challenging past conventions, but also have an awareness of themselves in the history of graphics and visual media,” Beckhorn said.
Beckhorn reminisced on his younger self, with ambitions of creating a business enterprise through Neoglyphic Media.
“It had kind of a chunky beginning, just because I didn't know anything, and was kind of throwing shit around and seeing what would happen,” Beckhorn said.
While Beckhorn doesn’t feel he has the energy to run the Alternative Library, he still acknowledged its impact on his ability to independently publish works he cares about and shares his values.
“Neoglyphic definitely grew out of the Alternative Library, in a sense,” Beckhorn said. “The only reason that it ever was able to exist at all was because there was that platform for it to be born out of.”
Cullen Beckhorn standing outside his studio at the Lookout Arts Quarry. When not working in his studio, Beckhorn is outside tending his garden.