Artists’ Book Shop to Host 50th Anniversary and Book Fair

A New York City artists’ bookshop will host the 20th anniversary of its Art Book Fair this September, as a venue to showcase rare books and independent publishers. 

Printed Matter, the nonprofit independent arts bookstore, is also celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.

“Fifty years ago Printed Matter emerged from a moment of radical rethinking about what art can be, and how we experience it,” the bookshop’s CEO Lesley Martin wrote in a statement. “We have always championed the belief that creative experimentation and direct encounters with art are critically important — that art can be passed hand to hand and person to person, and that publications by artists are a powerful instrument to this end.”

In 1975, a group of artists decided they wanted to build a different kind of publishing and distribution system for art books. 

“Printed Matter coalesced around the idea that there was a growing need for an organization that championed artists who made books that ‘weren’t art in the conventional sense,’” the organization wrote in a press release for the event. “Fifty years on, Printed Matter continues that work. Its current home — a two-level bookstore and office [in New York] — houses 15,000 books by artists, zines, and periodicals, as well as out-of-print titles and historical ephemera.”

At the book fair, a wide range of publishers both independent and institutional will showcase rare, historic works, contemporary galleries and nonprofit art spaces, and a “thriving community of zine publishers” with an “experimental spirit,” as well as a series of book launches, lectures, performances, and exhibitions. 

“With artists’ voices — and the organizations that support them — increasingly under threat, we need Printed Matter now more than ever,” Martin wrote in the statement. 

Arts and publishing voices have been threatened by the current political climate in the United States. A number of leftist zines, for example, were recently used to sentence protestors to decades in prison. 

“It's incredibly chilling that recent events confirm that we are seeing increased pressure on and punishment of individuals exercising their most basic, fundamental First Amendment rights,” Martin told Printed Word Reviews. “For the past fifty years, Printed Matter has been synonymous with the support of artists' voices in publication form; an inherently independent, democratic artform. We are committed to the distribution, understanding, and appreciation of artists’ books; and to the support of artists using the printed page to express their individual identities, opinions, and creative explorations. The resulting books can be political, challenging, anti-establishment, or simply, radically beautiful in their experimentation of what’s possible with the book form in artists’ hands.”

Martin wrote that the Art Book fair will serve as a “critical point of exchange and sustenance for the international artists’ book community” to help facilitate discussions around politics and freedom of expression. 

The fair will run from September 24 through September 27 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.