Scenes from past NY Art Book Fairs

What do you get when you cross a museum and a bookshop? Printed Matter's fifth annual NY Art Book Fair, which returns to MoMA PS1 this weekend! The three day fair is completely free and open to the public, taking over three floors of the museum to occupy every nook and cranny with the art of the book.

The New Yorker writes:

Does the artist’s book contain the art, or is the book itself the art? Not limited by materials or size, the artist’s book can take any form: letterpress and bound by hand, photocopied like a zine, contained in a cigar box, as big as a table or as small as a fingernail. This free, hands-on event features more than two hundred exhibitors from two dozen countries...

The friendly, hands-on environment is part of what makes the event an annual favorite event among Team JBP. The fair is a great chance to see what's happening in the world of books, from established publishers like Aperture to independent zine makers and self-publishers like Little Brown Mushroom Books, with whom Jason Polan and photographer Trent Parke are collaborating on posters specially for the fair. Not only is the fair a great chance to purchase great books and get to know the people behind them, but several experimental publishers and artists will be holding events in the fair's project spaces:

Bedford Press & AA Bookshop (London), in collaboration with artist Joseph Grigely, will present Exhibition Prosthetics, an examination of art, architecture, and the conventions of exhibition production; Andrew Roth (New York) will present Ten Years of PPP Editions, a retrospective of work examining the historical intersections of photography and book art; e-flux (New York) will map a cosmology of texts, ideas, and contributors for its journal; Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI; New York) will present a screening program featuring new and historical video works drawn from its extensive collection; Fillip (Vancouver) will operate a free-distribution center for critical texts from the database of AAAARG.ORG (Los Angeles); PictureBox (Brooklyn) will present a survey that includes work by graphic artist King Terry, imagist Karl Wirsum, and horror-core draftsman Mat Brinkman; and students of Werkplaats Typografie (Arnhem), the Dutch super-school, will establish an alternative economic system for design services.

You can see a full list of exhibitors at the NYABF website. For extra pointers, check out T Magazine's feature on booths to check out while you're there. There's only one NYABF a year so if you're in or around New York, bring good walking shoes, a couple of dollars and head on over this weekend.

The New York Art Book Fair
presented by Printed Matter

at MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave. at the intersection of 46th Ave.
Long Island City, NY

Free and open to the public:
Thursday, November 4, 6-9 p.m.
Friday & Saturday, November 5 & 6, 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.
Sunday, November 7, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.