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.

[3] 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.

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[4] (which Jaxon had been a member of starting in 1966).

[5] Each Friday, the company sent out a distribution sheet with the strips it was selling, by such cartoonists as Shelton, Joel Beck, Dave Sheridan, Ted Richards, Bill Griffith, and Harry Driggs (as R. Diggs).

[5] Rip Off used its share of the rights fees to buy a new typesetting machine and a computer system,[5] which enabled it in turn to launch the mail order business that later became integral to the company's survival.

[10] After bouncing back and forth between Europe and the Bay Area in the late 1970s and early 1980s (thanks to the money he received from Universal),[5] co-founder Shelton and his wife permanently relocated to France in 1984.

[12] Freed of a 17-year accumulation of comics and other paraphernalia, Fred Todd (at this point the only original partner still working in the business) decided to relocate Rip Off Press to Auburn, California (part of the Sacramento metropolitan area), where he and Kathe continued to run the company while raising their two small children.