The Vienna Art Book Fair, held at the University of Applied Arts in October 2023, was less diverse than Miss Read, Berlin (which we had just participated in). In fact, while Vienna is a beautiful city, well worth visiting, with a considerable cultural heritage that includes (for example) Mozart, Freud, and the Viennese Actionists, it also comes off as a bit bourgeois or staid, what you might otherwise call affluent (at least in the city center). The benefits of such a milieu are that the streets are very tidy, the public transport is super-efficient, the parks along the Danube (and the river itself) are ecologically well cared for, and there are many very good museums as well as charming old-school shops scattered around the city that seem left-over from another era.
While the exhibition area was packed with exhibitors, there were many more local producers, leaning to the more crafted one-off or sculptural “artist book”. This is not to say there was a decided lack of the funky, as again, the art book fair circuit allowed Likink to become reacquainted with people like P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E.
Or more to the point, our Brussels-based compatriots, Walkscapes, who we first met in 2022 at the Antwerp Book Fair, but who we lost track of due to neglecting to pick up their business card. But alls well that ends well, as we exchanged contact information in far-flung Vienna and are currently in touch.
Above you have two different approaches to the same subject (found at the Vienna Art Book Fair), a subject that Likink is also attracted to. That is, mapping the city/randomly walking through the city/observing and documenting its foibles and unintentional beauties and/or decrepitude, in the tradition of the Baudelaire’s flaneur or Situationism’s dérive. Please check out the focused efforts of Walkscapes and Desired Landscapes.
Additionally, there was this crew (above), who approached us with the invitation to participate in their art book/zine fair, which unfortunately didn’t land on a date that was convenient for us (the card above was from their previous fair in May 2022).
It also seems, that along with the more established venues, whose fees are sometimes prohibitive for the DIY producer (for an egregious example see Printed Matters L.A. book fair which charged US$800 for a table) there is now a burgeoning art book/zine fair circuit that exclusively caters to (for example) self-publishers. Given the sheer weight of all the material at any given art book/zine fair, regardless of the scale of the producers, Likink proposes to have an art book/zine fair that only allows ONE (1) item on each table so that it becomes more of a performance than a market.
UP NEXT: Rotterdam’s ZINE CAMP ephemera