The wonderful, strange world of art book fairs

This piece was featured first on Feb 5 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.

I am, no surprise to any of you, a lover of books. I wouldn’t say that I’m a *collector* of books, but everyone else in my family would. And to be fair, there are piles of them all over the house (and in my car and in my closet). I love the smell of paper. I love the different bindings. I love the sense, on opening to a first page, that my very self could be different by the end of a paragraph or a chapter or a complete work.

In the book world, there are all these different levels. I won’t endeavor to explain the vagaries of New York publishing or what a regional book publisher is or how self-publishing is different. Because, really, I don’t care about those things. My favorite books can come from anywhere. Some are published by FSG and others are published by some weird person out of their garage.

I came to appreciate this deeply at the gatherings known as “art book fairs,” like San Francisco’s own, which occurs every summer. The first time I attended some years ago, I was stunned by the raw creativity on display. Some people printed gorgeous matte things. Others were cranking on risographs or whatever else they could find to reproduce their words and images.

I am a particular connoisseur of tiny books, texts that both have a small trim size and a smaller scope; I left the fair with a dozen. I bought Alex Arzt’s incredible tiny book about feral cabbages of the California coast. I bought a zine called My Favorite Microbes and Cortney Cassidy’s kind of haunting work Do Plants Feel? Few places have ever made me want to be a part of the world of letters more than the SF Art Book Fair.

(I also discovered the coolest design/art studio in the world, Mexico City’s Can Can Press, which is responsible for roughly one-quarter of my wardrobe now.)

Of course, there are many book fairs and each event has its own flavor. CODEX Book Art Fair, which opens this week in Oakland, focuses more on the “rich traditions and contemporary practices surrounding artists’ books and fine press publications.” It’s more the people who like to hand bind books or the absolute perfectionists at Arion Press in Fort Mason.

What all these events do, though, is show you the relentless promiscuity of books as a format. Books can paired with any interest, any topic, any format. They can be big or small, fancy or cheap, printed by the dozen or hundred thousand. Put two covers around some interior papers and you… have made a book. The contemporary publishing industry might be formulaic, but there are all these people pouring some sliver of consciousness into the space between two covers and sticking it on a table for you to see.

In a world where the most important media skill is staring into a camera and talking for one to three minutes about whatever algorithmically hot topic exists, these bookmakers are like a cryptic refugia for creativity, a wonderland of strange and wonderful creatures preserving a different, idiosyncratic culture that our world needs.

So: if you have a chance to get to CODEX this weekend, lemme know what you find. Really.

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Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum

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