The building at 1542 Haight Street, a former Woolworth’s, became the Print Mint in December 1966. Don and Alice Schenker had started the business in Berkeley a year earlier as a frame shop and poster retailer. The Haight store opened into the middle of the poster boom.
The Print Mint sold the concert posters that Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Rick Griffin, and Victor Moscoso were making for the Fillmore and the Avalon. Those posters, with their vibrating color and barely readable lettering, are now in museum collections. At the time they were advertising, printed cheap, and the Print Mint sold clean copies for about a dollar.
Beginning in 1968 the shop moved into publishing and distributing underground comix and became one of the main outlets for the form. The San Francisco store closed around 1972. The building still stands on the block.