The book watcher: Feminist publishing and the flight of ideas

Books aren’t just objects to be made or read—they’re creatures to be observed, moving through the world like flocks of birds. Nina Paim, designer, editor and curator, has spent years watching them, noting their migrations, their rare sightings, and the resurgence of a once-endangered species: the feminist book. From the brightly colored spines crowding bookstore shelves to the growing presence of feminist discourse in design publishing, a shift has taken place. This essay is both a reflection on that transformation and a personal journey through the feminist publishing ecosystem—one that led Nina to launch her own independent press, Bikini Books.

I’m not only a book maker or a book lover, but I’m a book watcher, which is to say, I am to books what ornithologists are to birds. I like to observe how books stick out from the shelf and how they move in flocks; but most importantly, I like to see them in the wild.

In recent years, there’s been a surge in a fine specimen once thought to be nearing extinction: the feminist book. Suddenly, in every bookstore, there’s been a high density of purple, pink, lavender, and red covers. That spike found its way to the design aisle, too. A few feminist books on design that have come out in the last few years are Feminist Designer, Data Feminism, Design Justice, Design Struggles, Extra Bold, BaselineShift, Cyberfeminism Index, Imperfect Index, Herstories in Graphic Design—the list goes on.

The Book Forest

Growing up in Brazil in the late 1990s and coming of age in the early 2000s, the word “feminism” wasn’t part of my lexicon—though this isn’t to say feminism wasn’t something I actively practiced or lived. I often felt like a stray crow, rasping away about all the things I felt were wrong or unjust. My early design bibliography at Esdi, the modernist-functionalist design school I attended in Rio de Janeiro, was a total herd of white fossils. Thankfully, there were other angry birds there, and together, we made some noise. 

Twenty years later, things have radically changed. Though I can’t quite pinpoint when exactly things began to shift, the first specimen I remember from this new murmuration was Hall of Femmes, a Swedish collection created by Samira Bouabana and Angela Tillman Sperandio in the late 2000s, which highlighted women in art direction and design such as Barbara Satuffaher, Tomoko Miho, and Rosemarie Tissi. Then, in 2017, a bird of a feather hit me hard: Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice, an academic compilation of over forty contributors looking at how power has been resisted and reimagined through design.

As the forest around me thickened, I could see more and more different birds. In 2019, frustrated by the male-dominated design discourse, three recent graduates—Silva Baum, Lea Sievertsen, and Claudia Scheer—published Notamuse, a book highlighting projects by women graphic designers alongside interviews exploring their challenges and experiences. I was one of the people interviewed, and that conversation shifted things for me in ways the editors may not even have realized.

Talking to them was energizing; it felt contagious to see other people making what they wanted to see in the world. This is one of the oldest impulses for feminist publishing: writing what’s missing, editing what’s lacking, and anthologizing what’s been forgotten. But publishing is, essentially, an ecosystem. Books, stories, and other written fowls don’t take flight independently—they rely on a network of publishers, distributors, booksellers, readers, critics, reviewers, and archives.

It was within this bibliodiverse environment that, in 2020, Eliot Gisel, Madeline Morley, and I launched Futuress.org, a feminist platform for design politics. For over three years, I helped shape its direction—curating online lectures and workshops, and editing a steady stream of texts. The experience expanded my network exponentially and made me realize how much I enjoy providing a roost for other people’s words. However, my day-to-day work remained solitary. I learned a hard lesson: not every shape in the sky is a flock in flight.

Coaxing a Fledgling

This is how, on a hot Spring day in 2023, I started Bikini Books. Starting a publishing house—let alone a feminist publishing house—is like shoving a fledgling into the air. There’s an unattributed quote that keeps perching in my mind like the nasty seagulls of Porto: “Making a small fortune in publishing requires starting with a bigger one.” Without much capital, I began Bikini the only way I could—by investing my own labor.

Bikini’s first book is a longform illustrated interview with Briar Levit, a graphic designer turned educator and documentary filmmaker who co-directs The People’s Graphic Design Archive. In July 2023, I sat down with her on the floor of the British Library and the Foyles flagship bookstore in London as we talked about gender and technology, hiking, thrifting, life’s unpredictability, the backlash against feminism, and the role of relationships in navigating it all.

It was the book’s editor, Franca López Barbera, who, upon listening to the raw transcripts, picked up friendship as a throughline, a realization that shaped not only the book’s structure, but also my own thinking. It’s often friendships and relationships that pull us into new spaces, draw us into feminist organizing, keep us grounded, and offer the books that change us. And there’s a particular kind of friendship—a feminist friendship—that transforms us politically and reshapes the course of our lives.

Briar Levit: On Design, Feminism, and Friendship is a product of one such relationship. It appeared in English and Portuguese, copublished by Bikini Books with Clube do Livro do Design, a Brazilian publisher focused on design, creativity, and labor, founded and run by the São Paulo-based Tereza Bettinardi. We’ve known each other for over a decade, and she was among the first people to whom I voiced my desire to start Bikini. For several months, we met on Fridays to share notes on publishing and commiserate. Eventually, the idea of a copublication began to hatch.

In practical terms, our two houses shared all editorial costs, contributed labor, and retained rights to publish the book in our respective markets. Our collaboration allowed us to launch our book in Portland in late November 2024, followed by releases in São Paulo and Porto two weeks later. It’s no small feat: two birds flying further together than they could alone.

But that’s the thing about birds, right? They rarely fly solo, and when they do, they’re never truly on an uncharted path. This instinct isn’t unique to nature—it’s mirrored in publishing, where every new venture builds upon the groundwork of those who came before. 

Migratory Routes

The feminist publishing movement of the 1970s and 1980s was one such migratory pattern, forming a dense and interconnected network that shaped the literary landscape across languages and continents. As historian Trysh Travis described in her 2008 article “The Women in Print Movement: History and Implications”, this was “a woman-centered network of readers and writers, editors, printers, publishers, distributors, and retailers through which ideas, objects, and practices flowed in a continuous and dynamic loop.” They explored all kinds of literary genres, from poetry and history to science fiction, erotica, autoethnography, humor, the built environment, cookbooks, and, of course, design.

In 1984, the Matrix Design Co-Operative published Making Space, a book critiquing the patriarchal built environment—both domestic and public—by exposing sexist assumptions in architecture and urban planning. The following year, Feminist Art News, a quarterly magazine, dedicated a special issue to design featuring feminist perspectives on design knowledge, history, and manufacturing. In 1986—the year I was born—Cheryl Buckley published her article “Made in Patriarchy” in Design Issues, laying important foundations for a feminist approach to design history.

I only read this pivotal text in 2017, after I’d finished my master’s. It’s crazy to admit this to myself, but in the four design programs I studied in Brazil, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, design was never viewed through a feminist lens. The reasons for this are many, but crucially, they have to do with publishing. The late 1980s saw a fierce backlash against feminism, similar to what we’re currently witnessing, alongside the rise of neoliberalism marked by mergers and acquisitions, the consolidation of chain bookstores, and the emergence of Amazon—all of which hurt independent publishing and bookstores.

This decline helped widen the generational gap between feminists: it made some people my age coming into feminism feel we needed to reinvent flying. When we did find the missing link, we often felt guilty, as if we’d been deprived of our heritage and were arriving at things late. That’s why, as much as it’s crucial to keep publishing new voices, it’s also extremely important to keep recirculating texts that already exist. 

The second Bikini Book, Made in Patriarchy, is a compilation of two texts by Cheryl Buckley from 1986 and 2020 that I believe every designer should read. But recirculating doesn’t just mean republishing; it also means gathering, compiling, and re-editing. This is what Amy Papaelias is doing for Alphabettes Soup: Feminist Approaches to Type, the third Bikini Book, forthcoming this September. 

Amy, who’s been keeping the lights on at the Alphabettes platform since it started in 2015, has been helping authors strengthen pieces they originally wrote for the blog and guiding newly commissioned texts for the book. The result is a flocking of voices, ideas, letterings, and typefaces that’s only possible through the generous sponsorship of many companies and individuals in the type industry—a real feathered affair.  Like a murmuration, it’s a testament to the power of movement and collaboration in publishing, where ideas take flight through the efforts of many.

As I near my final word count, I find myself wondering where the bird metaphor came from. As a child, I remember watching Fly Away Home, a movie about a girl who discovers a bunch of wild goose eggs in a devastated forest. The eggs hatch, and the orphaned goslings grow attached to her, but without their elders, they don’t know where to migrate. The girl gets her father to build this amazing small airplane, and together, they fly the geese south, a journey through the beautiful landscape. It’s a story about humans, nature and a  little girl—but to me, it’s a blueprint for publishing.