THEY ALWAYS MAKE ME COME BACK

I spent the end of last week at the Celebration of the Chapbook, at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. It featured a bookfair with various publishers of chapbooks and chapbookish things, panel discussions, and workshops. As mentioned briefly in my previous post, I had a great deal of fun, and I am really glad that I went.

The whole thing was well-organized. Turn-out was good. There was the usual bookfair conflict where as an exhibitor one is torn between going to the panels and staying at one’s table. That is a problem that it takes specific planning to avoid. The panels, one on the history of chapbooks, one on chapbooks nowadays, were interesting. I did not attend any of the workshops.

There was some great work on the tables. Highlights (for me) include:

Ugly Duckling Presse is a publishing collective that is putting out tons, tons of great work.

Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs is the publishing venture of Brenda Iijima, and they are releasing books from a variety of interesting writers.

X-ing Books/Booklyn: Booklyn is an artists’ books group in NY. X-ing Books is a sub-sect that is doing some literary publishing. Mark Wagner (of both groups) was kind enough to show me some of his decidedly unchapbook, high end artists’ books.

And of course there was Cuneiform Press (say no more).

I came home with a bunch of new books—bought, traded, and gifted. I also unloaded a bunch of work (see post below) and spread the word about Et Al.

My favorite thing about doing these fairs is the amazing, kind, generous, intelligent, and engaged people that I get to meet and hang out with. Incredible.