Stockist Spotlight:
Chess Club in Portland, Oregon
April 22, 2026
Chess Club was co-founded by Christy Lai and Andrew Simon in 2023, and has since grown into a community hub for browsing niche global magazines and connecting with like-minded creatives. This global lens is personal to the team, their many multicultural identities contributing to the shape that Chess Club takes. 4N editor Kelly Rogers spoke with Andrew, a writer, teacher, and Portland-native about Chess Club’s beginnings and their role as a portal from Portland to other parts of the world.
Kelly Rogers: You and Christy both have design backgrounds and a shared love of print. How did this commonality become what Chess Club is today?
Andrew Simon: Christy and I have been friends for a while, and maybe like all good ideas it came to us late one night at a party. We realized that we had a similar taste in magazines and that certain ones were hard to find in a city like Portland. There’s a big design and creative community here, but not stores stocking the glossy fashion magazines like stores in New York, London, or Berlin. There wasn’t a magazine store doing the work that we envisioned, and we like the idea of “build the thing you wish you had in the world as a resource for yourself.”
Before we opened our physical store we did pop-ups for about a year all over the city, and these helped us find people who were interested in really specific magazine titles. We found different communities—like a typography conference, a queer block party, a vintage store, a day rave—who might be interested in print. Now we have an event space to host programming and facilitate that connection between people over print media. Doing this in an IRL space in a time where everything feels so digital and communities feel really fractured seems like a major part of the success of our business and project overall.
KR: Yeah, we’ve also seen the value and necessity of getting outside of your little bubble—even if it is entering another niche space. It does a lot to just bring your things somewhere else. And that’s how you found us, right? At a book fair?
AS: I met some folks at the book fair in New York—I don’t remember how I came across it but I thought “Oh, this is really special,” and exactly the kind of magazine I want to have at our store. 4N is a very specific POV, bringing in voices you wouldn’t necessarily find in other magazines.
KR: And we felt so aligned with you guys, as a shop that focuses on a global perspective. How do you source all of these eclectic titles from around the world?
AS: Everyone on our team has their own special interests, and the shop becomes a reflection of those. Our production coordinator Sid Pi is really into surfing, and once brought in this obscure surfing magazine from Australia called Primitive Skills. I also rely a lot on our customers who introduce us to new things. From a curatorial lens, we aim to stock magazines that have some shelf life, where an issue from 2023 or 2024 is still relevant and interesting.
KR: There’s a lot of room for discovery there. One of the nice things about slower-format print is its ability to be evergreen for a lot of different reasons. Someone may be picking it up for the content, or the design, or the typography. It must also feel good to be the person who’s able to track down a really unique title for someone.
AS: Yeah, it does! Something I enjoy so much that I didn’t anticipate was how I can connect people who come in with the same interests. I say, “Oh, there's someone else in Portland who picks up that same magazine and they’re also interested in whatever niche thing that you might be interested in. Have you met them?” and then I try to connect them.
I love being in the Pacific Northwest, but there are times it can feel a little cut off from the rest of the world. Sometimes it feels like we’re doing a service for people to provide materials that they previously had only found in their home country. It’s really important to have the space where they can find their thing, and usually that means stocking in really limited quantities, trying to have a breadth of titles. We’re also trying to contribute to an all-ages culture where younger people can be inspired and tap into different things that remind them there’s a world outside of the PNW.
“Since our pop-up days we’ve run on one instinct: set up the board, and let anyone play. We amplify print that answers to no one and connect people who didn’t know they were looking for each other.” —Christy Lai, Co-owner & design director
KR: In that way it moves beyond a retail space and becomes more of a community resource. You’re also doing this in a culturally significant part of Portland.
AS: We’re near Portland’s Chinatown, which has gone through many changes. Unfortunately, many of the Chinese-owned businesses are no longer here. Christy is Chinese-American, and considering the neighborhood’s legacy was always important to us. We’re also near Portland’s historic Japantown, which has mostly been lost. And now we have close partnerships and relationships with publications and businesses in Japan, so we’re trying to continue the international exchange between Portland and Japan. There are some younger businesses like ours—a global snack shop, an anime cafe—that are contributing to the evolution of the neighborhood.
KR: Okay, so there are a lot of cultural histories converging there. And you’re bringing even more parts of the world into this mix through the titles you stock.
AS: We’re trying to serve people who are interested in global conversations and communities. We also serve many tourists and visitors to Portland, and people seeking connection beyond the US.
KR: Our upcoming issue of 4N, themed “alias,” looks at artists who are exploring multiple identities in their work, and “Chess Club” really feels like an alias. Where did the name come from?
AS: We intentionally chose a misleading name and appreciate the connotations of a chess club, what it is, and how it describes what we’re doing for our community. We like the design language of chess and how it’s this universal, timeless game. We are also inspired by an incredible avant-garde clothing store near us called Stand Up Comedy which, of course, isn’t actually a standup comedy venue.
KR: In college we had a bar right off campus called The Library, very close to our actual library. So you always had to specify which library your friends actually wanted to go to.
AS: Exactly, we like the theater of forcing people to question where they are and what’s going on. During the pandemic, more people were playing chess, especially online. I love chess, and kept talking to people about how it can be really disorienting to play 2D chess on your phone and then move to a 3D chess board. It challenges your brain. And that rhymed with another conversation I often have with people, how encountering content on your phone is different from the content in physical media. That can also be disorienting, like did I already read this article? Did I not read this article? We’re interested in this question of digital-physical interplay, and we’ve been online for a very long time.
KR: So you have these perspectives as veterans of the internet.
AS: Totally. We’re not choosing a side, we’re not saying “Print is better, get off your phone/get off the internet.” We’re just interested in interrogating the relationship between physical and digital, and deciding on the name Chess Club is part of that.
KR: Is there anything that’s surprised you about being involved in the magazine and indie book space for a few years now?
AS: I interact with customers on a really personal level, which, I feel like you have to when somebody brings something to the counter that you’re like–why are you buying this? What’s this for? Sometimes I sell the magazine and sometimes I don’t. And sometimes they just want to cut it up for a collage.
Just this morning I was texting my friend Aaliyah who owns Periodicals in Detroit, sharing notes about what we’re stocking, what’s selling, what they’re excited about. Very businesses in the US focus on magazine culture, and we’re not competitive with each other. So it's fun to be in community with other magazine shops.
KR: That’s really nice to hear—so many different levels of community! And an important part of that is realizing you can’t do it all or be everywhere, and leaning on that support from others to fill in the gaps and share resources.
AS: There’s an incredible photo bookstore in Portland called Hi Books that I send people to all the time, and two great art-focused bookstores: Monograph Bookwerks and Passages Bookshop. I’m always sending people there, and they send people to us. It’s nice to be in an industry that shows love and devotion toward print culture, which I see from getting to know retailers, publishers, writers, designers, and everyone involved in the art of print.
Find Chess Club at 435 NW 6th Ave in Portland and @chessclub.art