Rip Off Press
mail order retailer and distributor
Rip Off Press Inc. is a comic book mail order retailer and distributor, better known as the former publisher of adult-themed series like The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Rip Off Comix, as well as many other seminal publications from the underground comix era. Founded in 1969 in San Francisco by four friends from Austin, Texas — cartoonists Gilbert Shelton and Jack Jackson, and Fred Todd and Dave Moriaty — Rip Off Press is now run in Auburn, California, by Todd.
Rip Off Press is notable for being the first company to publish the fourth edition of the Principia Discordia, a Discordian religious text written by Gregory Hill and Kerry Thornley. It was also an early publisher of a booklet on drug manufacturing, Psychedelic Chemistry.
History
Origins
In January 17, 1969, the company was founded in San Francisco by four Texans: Fred Todd, Dave Moriaty, and cartoonists Gilbert Shelton and Jack Jackson. The initial plan was to print rock band promotional posters on an old press and do comics on the side — in some ways the company was formed as a sort of cartoonists' cooperative, as an alternative publishing venue to other Bay Area publishers like Apex Novelties and Print Mint. The four men purchased a used Davidson 233 offset printing press and set up shop in the same space as Apex Novelties, located on the third-floor ballroom of the former Mowry's Opera House, at 633 Laguna Street in Hayes Valley.
The first comics Rip Off Press published, in 1969, were R. Crumb's Big Ass Comics (June '69), a reprint of Jaxon's God Nose (originally published in 1964), Jaxon's Happy Endings Comics (August '69), and the first issue of Fred Schrier and Dave Sheridan's Mother's Oats Comix (October '69).
After a fire almost destroyed the opera house in late 1969, Rip Off moved to the decaying former headquarters of the Family Dog psychedelic rock music promotion collective (which Jaxon had been a member of starting in 1966).
“Rip Off Press” enters the record as mail order retailer and distributor. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Press, mail and order can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Rip Off Press” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Press, mail and order provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3433016. VIAF identifies the subject as 159780078. The Library of Congress control number is no2002040411. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1969, 1964 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rip Off Press” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.