When lockdown emptied the streets and most independent authors put their plans on ice, a handful kept sending us files. Reuben Radding was one of them. The Brooklyn photographer, educator and musician kept printing with us through that strange stretch, and nobody here has forgotten it.
So when his name reappeared in our inbox in February 2026, it was like a regular walking back into the shop. Here, step by step, is how his new zine, Saturn Return, made it to his door in New York.
The years in between
Reuben has self published limited edition zines since 2019, and we have been his printer for years, with INSINUENDOES in 2023 among the titles. Then he stepped back. His debut photobook, Heavenly Arms, came out with Red Hook Editions in 2024, and he took a couple of years off zines so the big offset book could have the spotlight to itself. In the meantime, he told us, he had pointed as many people our way as he could. Loyalty, it turns out, runs in both directions.
Late February, and a spec in one line
His email opened with “Hey friends! Been a long time, but I’m ready to do another zine.” The spec followed in a single line, with the warning that “this will be familiar”: A5, wire stitched, 36 pages on 170gsm silk, black ink throughout. It was. Mike replied the next morning with the paperwork and a word about the snow then smothering Manhattan and Brooklyn, and Reuben paid and sent his artwork soon after.
A colour file for a black ink zine
The PDF arrived in colour, with a request that we convert it to greyscale for printing. That is a perfectly good way to supply a monochrome job, and our prepress team handled the conversion so each tone would translate cleanly to black ink. It also gave us our first proper look at the pictures.
Saturn Return gathers New York street photographs made between 2024 and 2026, and it is classic Reuben: street life, action packed protest and random events that last a split second. On the cover, a line of police officers stands in front of a wall of identical jewellery posters, with SATURN RETURN reversed out of a black tab top left and his name small at bottom right. Inside, two figures somersault above a flat rooftop against a raw grey sky. A kid pedals past with playing cards clipped into his spokes. A man in a “GO NEW YORK GO” shirt roars down the lens. Each one makes the case for keeping a camera out and primed whenever you walk the city.
Each frame sits inside a black page surround, which ties together pictures taken years apart in very different light. The pairings carry the story: a rain lashed crossing faces a figure scaling a chain link fence, and a cheering protest crowd faces a lone man hoisting a metal chair overhead. A couple of spreads ask you to give the zine a quarter turn, so portrait frames such as a skateboard handplant and a leap into the sea get a full page each instead of shrinking to postage stamps.
Proof, press and the case for A5 landscape
We sent a final online proof that same afternoon, and the job moved on to press. The format deserves a word here. A5 landscape, 210mm wide by 148mm tall, is a standard size, yet we rarely see photo zines embrace it. Turned on its side, the page suits the wide frames of street photography far better than a portrait sheet, so most pictures run almost edge to edge behind a slim border and very little of the street gets cropped. Staying standard keeps it economical, and it travels across the Atlantic without fuss.
The zine is self cover: all 36 pages, outer leaves included, are the same 170gsm silk. That makes the outside sturdy enough to protect the rest, keeps the spine slim and gives the zine an even weight as it flips. Silk suits black ink too. Its smooth, faintly sheened surface holds dense shadows and fine grain, so night scenes keep their depth and bright skies keep their highlights. Staples along the short edge finish it, and if the binding is new to you, read how wire stitching holds a zine together.
New York, eight days later
Trimmed and stapled, the zines left us for New York and landed with Reuben eight days after his artwork reached us. No reinvention, no drama: a familiar spec done properly for a photographer we have printed for years.
If you shoot the street, take a few cues from this one. Try A5 landscape before you default to portrait; our notes on weighing up zine formats compare the options. Give each frame the same surround so years of wandering hang together as one edit, rotate your vertical shots rather than shrinking them, and study the greyscale proof closely if you supply colour files for black ink. When your sequence is ready, show it to our zine printing team.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100