About Yip
Yonkers International Press was a small press that operated between 2015-2021 in New York City. Although operations have ceased, a thread of the press lives on in the form of Times Square Books, an open invitation to publish anyone who works outside in Times Square.
Yip was Founded by Ben Van Buren in 2015.
SITI Company: This Is Not A Handbook
A collection of essays, interviews, scanned ephemera, and photographs by members of SITI Company. Collected and published on the occasion of the company's closure, after 20 years of operation.
Edited by Megan Carter
SITI Company brings you SITI Company: This Is Not A Handbook, a book co-written by members of SITI that is wildly different from the books Anne Bogart has written on actor training. SITI Company: This Is Not A Handbook is filled with anecdotes from rehearsals and tours, backstage shenanigans, intimate investigations of craft, and many photos and ephemera from 30 years of working together. It captures the ensemble as a passionate collective of individual artists and illuminates the many layers of theatrical process.
—SITI Company
$35.00 on LuluThe Flashpaper: Theatre's Thoughts on Right Now
The Flashpaper: Theatre’s Thoughts on Right Now is a biannual publication in which 10-12 theatre artists and/or theatre companies create new work that responds to a specific prompt about an urgent current event. Their responses are published to elevate their voices, provide them with compensation, and present a snapshot of how they are collectively engaging with the present moment.
Edited by Mark Blankenship
I appreciate the perspective of The Flashpaper, and I appreciate having artists engage with the idea of justice. I believe art really is a lever, and if you use it correctly, it can create change.
—John Ridley, Academy Award winner for 12 Years a Slave. Emmy-nominated creator of American Crime.
$27.5 on LuluTimes Square Books and Archive
Edited by Ben Van Buren
Yip has a long history of publishing and archiving in and around Times Square, Manhattan. If you work or live in the area and would like to get involved in the fun please drop us a line! :)
Times Square Books
An open invitation to publish anything by anyone who works in Times Square. Active since 2017, the series has accumulated more than 15 titles.
Times Square Archive
A small, but growing, archive of materials from Times Square
Video Games: Playing for a Living
A collection of interviews (conducted 2019) with Streamers and Content Creators and E-Sports Casters who play, and comment on Video Games for a living. Interviews focused on the practical side of the job—budgeting time and choice of equipment—but also the emotional and psychological impact of turning a passtime into a profession.
Edited by Ben Van Buren
Featuring:
—John Romero, creator of Doom, founder of id Software.
—Spawn Wave Media, daily video games news show.
—Rachel Rossin, artist.
$4 (digital only) on Vapor95
Musical Theater Today
Musical Theater Today was a yearly anthology in print dedicated to collecting interviews, essays, ephemera and sheet music from within contemporary musical theater.
$35 on LuluMoon Fate Sin
By Gillain Walsh
Moon Fate Sin is a collection of anagrams of Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto published and sold on the occasion of the Moon Fate Sin performance at Performa '17.
limited edition, sold out.
Lion's Jaw Dance + Performance Festival
THE BOOK at the Lion's Jaw festival was a yearly meditation on the futility of documenting live performance.
Each YIP would install various ways for festival participants to leave their marks. This included setting up flatbed scanners, creating and recording online chatrooms, and hosting writing workshops.
The result is a series of messy, beloved volumes that fail spectacularly.
THE BOOK 2019, $25
THE BOOK 2018, $25
THE BOOK 2027, $20
The Book is Someone to Touch
By Ben Van Buren
Comissioned for the exhibition In The Historical Present, celebrating the centenery of the New School, curated by Macushla Robinson and Anna Harsanyi.
Adopting the gallery space as kind of home base and work space, Yip periodically ventured deep into New School property equipped with a purpose-built ‘scanning cart’—a simple pushcart with battery powered scanner installed on top.
On these excursions Yip would make scans of everything and anything, nothing in particular. Student’s faces, pieces of trash, pieces of art—whatever was in the path of the cart. The result is a moving-average of the feel of the New School as it was turning 100.
The resulting books beg questions about the nature of commemoration and the virtue of archival practice. Much like the institution itself, these books are full of success and failure. Certainly, if such a book has any value it’s not because it’s thrilling to read. It’s because it’s a body. It’s because it can capture all that unspoken heft that moves beyond the semantic content of a specific institutional utterance. That heft that does something, is doing something.
Three iterations of The Book is Someone to Touch were printed as scans accumulated.
Iteration 1 - Scans 1-149, Black and White, Paperback
$20 on Lulu2 - Scans 1-261, Color, Paperback
$123.12 on LuluIteration 3 - Scans 1-446, Color, Linen Wrapped Hardcover
$865 on LuluSex and Other Stories, by Ishmael Houston Jones
Fat and Other Stories could also be subtitled “some writing about New York.” Here is the grime of the East Village apartment where the illegal tenant takes off his socks last; the brown walls of the Westside Club in Chelsea that offer little privacy; and the basement of the all male strip club in Times Square, now gone. New York is the final bedfellow in this sometimes frank, sometimes dreamlike collection. Houston-Jones choreographs the ghosts of this self-erasing city of lovers and strangers.
First publicly available at performances of THEM
by Ishmael Houseton-Jonhes, Chris Cochrane and Dennis Cooper at Performance Space New York, June 2018.