Book Bash 2024

Join us at our second annual Book Bash—a weekend-long-event convening independent publishers in art, architecture, culture, and more. Support publishers in/outside of NYC and shop from a variety of vendors, including zines, creative collaboratives, indie presses and more. A curated collection of Storefront books and merchandise will be available for sale.

Book Bash will also include the launch of our latest publication, On the Ground: Reader. A culmination of research, new commissions, and archival materials, and more, this reader follows our 2023–2024 exhibition and research theme On the Ground, which closely examined New York City’s storefronts.

The Architectural League of New York supports critically transformative work in the allied fields that shape the built environment. As a vital, independent forum, the League stimulates thinking, debate, and action on today’s converging crises of racism, inequity, and climate change, in service of a more livable and just world. Urban Omnibus is The Architectural League’s online publication dedicated to observing, understanding, and shaping the city. We raise new questions, illuminate diverse perspectives, and document creative projects to advance the collective work of citymaking.

Based in Manhattan’s Chinatown and Lower East Side, Art Against Displacement AAD is a coalition of artists and arts professionals that seeks to amplify the demands of those whose lives and livelihoods are placed at risk by predatory development and resettlement, and to work in solidarity with grassroots organizations toward community-led rezoning. The group affirms that gentrification is not an inevitable effect of urban development, and refuses to let the work of cultural producers be instrumentalized towards the displacement of long-term residents and businesses.

CARA is an arts nonprofit, research center, publisher, and bookstore that aims to expand public discourses and historical records to reflect art’s abundant pasts, presents, and futures. Through initiatives including publishing, exhibitions, public programs, and fellowships, we seek to challenge dominant narratives and amplify the breadth of arts and culture.

Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard is an artist-led center that researches and supports art and activist practices globally. 

Columbia Books on Architecture and the City aims to expand the ground of architectural discourse. Our books ask urgent questions about what architecture is and does—and model different forms of architectural production beyond building. We hope to amplify new voices while reflecting on those who’ve shaped the field in vital ways, and to publish books that rethink the assumptions and epistemologies of architectural practice and confront the discipline’s complicity in enduring forms of injustice.

Combos Press is a queer-run small publisher based in Catskill, NY. We sprouted in 2022 after publishing Queer Earth Food 1, an anthology of writing and art at the intersection of food, agriculture, and queerness. Currently, Combos Press is focused on publishing work by LGBTQ+ people and anyone involved in food and agriculture.

e-flux commissions and publishes some of the most influential writings on art, film, history, technology, and politics in its monthly online publication and series of books, published together with Sternberg Press and the University of Minnesota Press.

Floating Opera Press is a Berlin-based occasional imprint started by Aaron Bogart, publishing contemporary criticism and artists’ books.

Frieze is the world’s leading platform for modern and contemporary art, dedicated to artists, galleries, collectors and art lovers alike.

Grace Issues is an independent publisher that values books and printed ephemera that pulsate life and never-ending experimentation. Where conventional ‘decency’ finds its counter in the pursuit of creation, we publish work that often honors the ancestral practices of Black and Indigenous people, memorializing them in the archives as vital ancient technologies through experimental publishing

Head Hi is a cultural organization bridging art, architecture and design via projects, reading materials and public programming founded in New York City in 2017.

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) supports the study and visibility of Latin American art. ISLAA recognizes Latin American artists and cultural movements as integral to the trajectory of twentieth-and twenty-first-century art. We seek to expand these narratives by creating opportunities for researchers, curators, and the public through grants, exhibitions, publications, and our art and archival collections.

Founded in 2003, Log is an independent journal on architecture and the contemporary city that presents criticism and commentary in a literary format designed to resist the seductive power of the image in media while identifying and elaborating the central concerns of architectural thinking and production today.

Makan Press is a New York based artist-run photo book publication house that aims to support the work of immigrant artists and those from countries of conflict and beyond. PHOTOGRAPHY FROM YEMEN is Makan’s debut publication. Makan Press is operated by Yemeni American artist Ibi Ibrahim.

Envisaged as the third iteration of the spirit of Lola Montez (Lola, Maria, Mario), Montez Press was formed in 2012. We have since commissioned and published experimental work by artists, writers and thinkers with a focus on queer and intersectional feminist practices through the lens of artists’ writing. We are committed to curiosity, questioning established methods and systems, and engaging in open conversation and dialogue. 

New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture (and more) in New York (and elsewhere). A magazine for a general readership, NYRA aims to reverse the decline of publicly-oriented critical commentary on architecture and design by publishing writing which treats buildings and urban spaces as cultural artifacts, putting architecture alongside film, literature, and other fields of popular interest and concern. 

Pina is a new exhibition space in the form of a magazine in-print. Each issue houses two 60-page exhibitions commissioned uniquely for Pina—both of which are accompanied by a work of short fiction and a conversation between the artist and a notable thinker. Pina proposes to reimagine the exhibition as a world-building experience, accessible from multiple entry points within a flat, portable and collectible space.

PIN–UP is a New York-based magazine focused on pure architectural entertainment — the meeting point of architecture, art, and design.

Primary Information is a non-profit organization founded in 2006 to publish artists’ books and artists’ writings. The organization’s programming advances the often-intertwined relationship between artists’ books and arts’ activism, creating a platform for historically marginalized artistic communities and practices. Primary Information facilitates intergenerational dialogue through the simultaneous publication of new and archival books, providing a new audience for out-of-print works and historical context for contemporary artists.

Research and Destroy New York City makes zines with their hands.

SITU Research is a visual investigations practice developing new forms of fact-finding to cut through digital noise and amplify truth. Working together as a group of designers, urbanists, computer scientists, and analysts, we synthesize disparate forms of digital evidence to provide exhaustive, factual accounts of contested events. Our efforts are focused on human rights, environmental justice, policing, and civil liberties.

Small Editions is a design studio and independent artist book publisher based in Brooklyn, NY. We offer services in book design, print consulting, and limited edition bookbinding. Through our publishing imprint, we collaborate with artists to create unique, limited edition artist books. Small Editions maintains an independent teaching practice around themes of book making, experimental publishing, and print production. We’ve lectured at Yale School of Art, Pratt University, and the New School, among others.

Third Place Zine is a digital and print publication dedicated to stories and art about the built environment, urbanism, and community. Third Place Zine’s first issue, Parkscapes explores parks across the world and asks the question, “Who is the park for?”

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School is an artist-focused research center and public forum for art, culture, and politics. Founded in 1992, the center is a nonprofit that catalyzes and supports politically engaged art, public scholarship, and research internationally. We champion the arts as expressions of the political moments from which they emerge, and consider the intersection between art and politics the space where new forms of civic engagement must be developed.

Viscose is a journal for fashion criticism. Launched between Copenhagen and New York in 2021, the irregular periodical publishes critical writing and research projects by a wide range of authors from the worlds of art, fashion, literature, and academia.

Wendy’s Subway is a reading room, writing space, and independent publisher in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We support emerging artists and writers in making experimental, urgent work and create alternative modes for learning and thinking in community. Wendy’s Subway is dedicated to encouraging creative, critical, and discursive engagement with arts and literature. 

Winter Editions is a small press with a particular focus on poetry and its intersections with the essay, the novel, and the visual and performing arts. WE supports writing which pursues an “other” way—opposing generic constructs and codified forms, or offering unfamiliar, outsider, or marginalized perspectives. Dreaming of social and aesthetic engagement beyond commodity, hierarchy, and exclusion, WE publishes for readers who desire intimate, unquantified relations.

Founded in 1985, Zone Books is an independent nonprofit publisher in the humanities and social sciences, with a special focus on interdisciplinary projects. Zone publishes original works by international scholars of philosophy, history, art history, cultural and sound studies, as well as political and social theory that have changed conversations across disciplines. Zone titles are edited by Jonathan Crary, Michel Feher, Hal Foster, and Ramona Naddaff, and designed by Julie Fry, based on an original concept by Bruce Mau.