Every year without fail, I neglect to get my holiday shopping done early. Before I know it, I’m on the brink of a breakdown at the Bryant Park holiday market, waiting in a throng of tourists for overpriced scarves and day-old apple cider donuts. It’s a Christmas tradition of sorts.
But this past weekend, I found a cure for my gift-related procrastination at the cavernous Pioneer Works in Brooklyn: the Press Play fair, a two-day gathering for independent publishers. Now in its fifth year, the event brought a wealth of remedies for the mind-numbingly commercial holiday season in the form of zines, books, and stickers — ideas, thoughts, and wishes you can touch and hold.
“‘Press Play’ is so much more than excellent wordplay,” observed Passenger Pigeon Press’s Chance Lockard. “They are things that go really hand in hand. It’s also really awesome to see so many well-dressed people turn out for something so cool.” (Lockard, for his part, sported a beautifully knit hat with ear flaps to drown out the crowded book-fair din.)
The extinct species that gives the publisher its name serves as a lodestar for its zines and Martha’s Quarterly edition, an homage to the last known passenger pigeon. Project Manager Holly Greene explained that the press, founded by Tammy Nguyen, is dedicated to “spreading ideas through unconventional paths that are detached from technology and more tangible.”
Press Play itself was a physical display of the unconventional paths carved by a global network of publishers, artists, writers, record labels, and editors, with free entry and several artist-led workshops inviting visitors into the fold. Veteran presses and organizations in attendance — Nightboat, Secret Riso Club, and Wendy’s Subway to name a few — tend to frequent the likes of the New York Art Book Fair and East Village Zine Fair, making for an environment of warm reunion. And when I visited during the fair’s final hours on Sunday, December 8, new connections and collaborations were already in bloom.
“That’s kind of the magic of small press fairs like this,” said illustrator, cartoonist, and riso artist Christina Lee, whose booth Lockard and Greene recommended.
“There’s a really nice community, and I think right now everyone’s really lonely. There’s one component of sharing your work and selling it to make a living, but there’s another component of seeing your friends and making new ones, like Kyle right here,” Lee said, pointing to illustrator and comic artist Kyle Canyon, who was seated at the same table. “I literally just met Kyle.”
Canyon also works with risographs and shares practices in common with Lee, a sign of the thoughtful booth curation that undergirded the fair. Serendipity was a common theme across the exhibitors, an observation echoed by Esmé Naumes-Givens, who was sharing a table with MAKE ME! Magazine’s Ann Lukyanova and David Gray.
“My mom’s name is Ann and my dad’s name is David, so it’s like kismet,” Naumes-Givens said. The artist is on a mission to create one zine per month before their 30th birthday in April, “kind of demarcating a decade of my life.” What began as a way to raise funds to travel to a friend’s wedding soon snowballed into a collection of deliciously psychedelic zines, all bound by hand with copper wire or wax thread.
“I was like, ‘What if every month of my 29th year I made a zine, and at the end I’ll have 12?’” For 30, they plan to shave their head and continue writing, which, true to the fair’s spirit, spans autofiction, visual art, and poetry.
“A solid 10% of the visitors who come by the booth have a publishing connection to something we have,” explained Charlotte Anderson of Ellipsis Rare Books, whose display included a first-edition copy of John Berger’s 1972 essay collection and Art History 101 mainstay Ways of Seeing.
“I was reading a book this morning while it was a little quieter, and it’s an obscure book of slipstream short stories from the ’90s. I had to hunt for this book just to be able to read it,” said Ellipsis founder Andrew Lenoir. “So I’m sitting here reading it, and a woman comes over and says, ‘You know, my husband published that.’ I didn’t believe her for a second. What are the odds that I was reading it, and she happened to pass by?”
Among all these strokes of luck and signs from the small press powers universe, perhaps it’s the lesson of the carrier pigeon that prevails: From riso notecards to handwritten zines, nothing compares to the weight of a piece of paper in your hand.
