NYABF 2015 Haul share

We survived the 2015 New York Art Book Fair! In the past we have covered the fair (2012, 2013, 2014) but since this was our first year participating in the fair, we decided to reach out to the great artists, writers, collectors, curators, and supporters of the fair to send us their hauls! Our full haul list can also be found below.

Paul Chan
(Artist and Director at Badlands Unlimited)

Suzanna Zak
(Artist and founder of Rock Bottom)

SEA OF TREES – Taylor Doran
SEA OF TREES is full of Taylor’s black and white photographs from the Suicide Forest in Japan. The grain and degradation of the xerox adds an appropriate amount of mystery to the setting. We can image how it might be to wander through a forest with such an emotional burden.
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EVEN OUR SPIT SHINES BRIGHT –  Sara Abruña
Even Our Spit Shines Bright is a carefully considered risograph publication of collages and writing. While the majority of the images are printed black and white, spots of red illuminate for us, “PEEL,” kiss marks, roses, and a scorpion. I’m certain that Dolly Parton would have this on her shelf.
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THE BRIDGE TO TOTAL FREEDOM & FALSE PROPHETS RESEARCH SURVEY VOL. 1 – Nina Hartmann
Nina deals with symbols and icons of counterculture like no one else. It is always a curious experience to watch these glyphs reappear in different forms of multiples, ranging from newsprint publications to screenprinted paintings. “OUT TO DESTROY YOUR MIND.” “PROTECT YOUR MIND: DEATH TO FALSE GODS”
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TAKE A STRAIGHT VIEW OF THE CROOKED WORLD! – Matthew Bellosi
Matthew Bellosi reconfigures fragments and ephemera from a darker side of music into new formations. This book in particular has an excellent sense of scale, using the shift in size to alter the original meaning. “Amazing hardcore, very aggressive and sick with a very low quality of recording.” “FUCK OFF TO THE BOTTOM FEEDERS”

HERE COMES JOHNNY REGGAE – Nathaniel Matthews
Nathaniel is engaged with the dissemination of information from hard to find sources. This publication legibly reproduces “the best piece of writing on skinheads.” There you have it. “Proud, hard, independent, honest, smart as fuck. All of this and more. Not bad for days like this.”
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AGENCY Volume 1 – Augustus Thompson
An excellent collection of Augustus’ writing as well as accompanying photos of recent clothing pieces. “Maybe the books we look at rub off on us – rub off like the patterns I’ve learned to make with you.” On the back cover of the book, you can read the words, “AGENCY ACTION RESULT.”
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SOFT ICE CREAM – Coley Brown
Coley recently started a new art book press called Silent Sound. This book is his own work published through his new imprint. Coley and I share an affinity for hand painted signage and this book is chock-full of some great examples. “COLOR ROSE / METAL ROD”
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[Untitled] – Daniel Shea & Jason Nocito
This publications pairs Daniel’s photographs from downtown Los Angeles with Jason’s photographs of New York. As an investigation of the built environment we can see the tensions between people and concrete. The content and the placement of the large color photographs sometimes appearing to wrap around pages leaves me thinking about cinema and Jacque Tati’s Playtime.
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I’M YOUR FAN – Moyra Davey
I’m Your Fan is a collection of six pieces of writing that range from intimate notebook entries to essays. Let’s just say I’m a fan of Moyra and her writing for it’s unique blend of personal and simultaneously critical writing. “I am a believer in heterogeneity as an enabler and enhancer of the story wanting to be told.”
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CLEARING –  Ryan Foerster
Clearing contains installation photographs of Ryan’s sculptures but in addition, the book is loaded with an array collages and other imagery. Even more intriguing is the writing, which I imagine to have a similar process to the other works; accumulating, sorting, degrading, shifting, transforming.
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WAS IST LOS – Seth Price
Each cover of this publication is spray painted, thus each copy is unique. Here’s a PDF of the book: http://www.distributedhistory.com/WAS+IST+LOS.final.pdf Seth put it on his website. This book came at the right time of the fair. I kept reading the sentence, “It is possible that cultured people are merely the glittering scum that floats upon a deep river of production,” over and over until I had it memorized.
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Dark Alcoves, Hidden Niches, and Cozy Corner – Meggie Kelley
Meggie’s publication is so dear to me that this is the second edition of this work that I own. (Originally published by Oso Press, this new edition was carefully designed by Noah Venezia, the only other person involved in art who I know from the unnamed suburban town we grew up in.) You don’t need to read The Poetics of Space, just read this. “In the moments when one is unable to remove oneself from normal space, one reverts to pitching a tent on the roof or in the living room, forming an internalized place of one’s own within an everyday space.”
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The More I Learn about Women – Lisa Kerezi
This haunting book contains snapshots rephotographed by Lisa. The source photographs come from an album gifted to Lisa by her father. While the icon of the “biker babe” exists, this work encapsulates Lisa’s personal experience living in the periphery of this world. “In protecting the identities of the women, I am also reiterating my relationship to them, which is none.”
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Hells Hollow Fallen Monarch – Melissa Catanese
Melissa is an expert in working with archives of vernacular photography. This book confronts us with men, their guns, and dead deer on display. I am curious about the parallels between the voyeuristic nature of seeing these photographs, and the hunters hiding in deer stands.The contrast between the old black and white photographs and the color landscapes reminds me that this is a story that still continues today.

Anika Sabin
(Managing Editor & Assistant Publisher at Capricious Publishing)

Its interesting normally there’s a pretty strong theme I come away with — like last LA Art Book Fair, it was super strongly queer, utopian ideas (Cruising the Archive from ONE, Utopias of So.Cal from Llano del Rio Guides, A Piece of Land from S.O.J.) but this time around — maybe because we were in the thralls of launching two books and had less consumptive time walking around the fair — I became much more narrow in my buying, visiting less tables, but spending more time at each one. Nearly every table I went to, I came away with at least two things (Draw Down Books, Soberscove Press, Torpedo Press, Conveyor) , and its given me a really nice sense of the publisher’s overall programming/vision on top of the individual books I picked up.

Matthew Higgs
(Artist and Director/Chief Curator at White Columns)

#1 pick from the fair:

DRAWINGS – William Crawford
Published by Ampersand Editions, 2015

David Solo
(New York-based collector of modern and contemporary artists’ and photo books, photography and works on paper)

Lucy Helton,  Transmission, Actions of Consequence; Katsuji Daibo, A Daibo Coffee Manual; Brian Griffin, Himmelstrasse; Noa Ben-Shalom, Hush; Paul Soulellis, Stripped; Clement Valla, Three Digs a Skull; Peter Happel Christian, AA Vol. 3 Clear As Day (with Phillip Andrew Lewis), Sword of the Sun; Daisuke Koyama, Rainbow Variations; Bruno Ceschel, Self publish, Be Happy Manifesto; Yuji Hamada, C M Y; Katja Stuke, Nationalfeiertag; Aaron Jamison, Cascades; Nicolo Degiorgis, Peak; Daisuke Yokota, Color Photographs; Takashi Arai, Monuments; Nick Waplington, Cunt Away; Thomas Albdorf, I Know I Will See What I Have Seen Before; Zoe Croggon, ARC; Pali Kashi, Totem No 1; Daniel Blaufuks, This Business of Living; Moyra Davey, I’m Your Fan; Rirkrit Tiravanija, Do Not Ever Work; Daniel Gordon, Portrait Studio; Magali Duzant, I Looked & Looked; Daido Moriyama, Fukei; Seiji Kurata, Toshi no Zokei; Melissa Catanese, Hells Hollow Fallen Monarch; Athena Torri, The Outsider; Galia Gur Zeev, Toda Vida.

Emmy Catedral
(artist and Manager of Publisher Services at ARTBOOK | D.A.P.)

1.  a giveaway newsprint teaser for the forthcoming from Inventory Press expanded facsimile of Blueprint for Counter Education by Maurice R. Stein, Larry Miller, and Marshall Henrichs, originally published by Doubleday in 1970.

2. (not pictured) Fantastic Architecture (Primary Information)

3. The Futurist Cookbook (Sternberg Press) and In The Holocene (MIT List/Sternberg)

4. A postcard for the great Marcel Broodthaers: My Ogre Book, Shadow Theater, Midnight (forthcoming from Siglio. There was an exciting advanced copy displayed)

5. Moyra Davey: I’m Your Fan (Camden Arts Center/Camilla Wills) inserted pamphlet essay Mothers by Moyra Davey (greengrassi)

6. 4 pamphlets (writing by Arthur Jafa, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. DuBois) from the On the Blackness of BLACKNUSS series (Publication Studio Hudson) edited by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

Must mention from Publication Studio Hudson: 3 Carl Skoggard translations of Walter Benjamin including the first available in English Sonnets.

7. Projecto Liquido: Fear (Fundacion Alumnos 47)

8. signed and editioned (by Jacqueline DeJong) treasure box no. 1: The Case of The Ascetic Satyr: Snapshots from Eternity by Asger Jorn & Jacqueline DeJong (JDJ/D.A.P.). Gorgeous replicas of the notes between DeJong and Asger Jorn including on an unused sheet from Mémoires (Jorn’s collaboration with Guy Debord).  

9. signed treasure box no. 2: Mike Mandel: The Good 70’s (D.A.P./J&L Books). Favorite pieces: an envelope of letters (a beautiful imagined correspondence) recently written by SFMoMA’s Sandra Phillips addressed to young Mike in the 70s, and of course the facsimile Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards.

10. honorable non hauled mentions: The Office of Culture and Design’s presentation in the basement theater (and the reprint of the excellent Filipino Folk Foundry) in the same program as Steffani Jemison’s presentation of her Promise Machine, Nicolo DeGiorgi’s (RORHOF) table with the excellent Hidden Islam, and new beautiful book of mountain tops, Matthew Connors: Fire in Cairo (Self Published Be Happy), Ariana Reines now sold out Ramayana (The Song Cave),  Hans Scharer and various Dietor Roth titles (Edizione Periferia), PPP: The Zines of Paper Rad (Bright Lyons), and and and…

Jeremy Haik
(Photographer and Adjunct Faculty at School of Visual Arts)