Event Recap: Publication Fair at The Cleaners

This recap is authored by contributor Karen Munro.  The Head of the UO Portland Library and a recipient of an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, Karen discusses books, reading, and writing on her wonderful blog Munrovian.

If you missed Sunday’s inaugural Publication Fair at the Ace Cleaners, I’m sorry to say I can’t really recap it for you.  Put me in a room with that much printed matter and I’m just agog.  But here are a few things worth checking out while you mark your calendar for next year’s fair…

• Add Tiger Food Press’s blog to your RSS reader, and delight in their beautiful letterpress work.  I’m a big fan of their small-dog cards, as well as the broadside of what looks like a ’67 Impala poised to cruise into the sunset, alongside this text:  “‘She takes it slow,’ she purred to the skinny gas station attendant.  She saw his knees buckle just a little.”  Bitchin’.
• Octopus Books (also the home of Octopus Magazine) creates gorgeous poetry books and chapbooks.  You can subscribe to everything they produce in a year…intelligent, ink-oriented, and arranged cleverly around ideas of eight.  You might also want to submit your full-length poetry MS to them next April.
• You probably already know about Plazm Magazine, but did you know they’re the geniuses behind the New Oregon Interview Series?  I didn’t.  But I’m definitely heading to their next panel sessions.  On January 27 they’ll be talking fashion, and the February bill lists Randy Gragg, Brad Cloepfil, and Mayor Sam Adams for a conversation about urban planning.  Yowza.
• If you’re in more of a stay-at-home mood, you may be intrigued by artist Zach Rose’s home lending library, where you can borrow some of his favorite books over email and the post.  Zach’s brother Josh just started library school, and this is a collaborative venture incorporating the best of the traditional lending library and the wide-open plains of the Internet.
• Container Corps, which just opened a new storefront on Killingsworth at Montana, has beautiful, sturdy handcrafted xylobooks for sale.  What’s a xylobook?  It’s “durable information storage,” according to their website.  And it’s good-lookin’.
• And of course, Matthew Stadler and Patricia No’s Publication Studio offered a wide array of manila-bound books printed on Stadler’s print-on-demand machine.  Great books by Sarah Meadows, Matt Briggs, Stacey Levine, and a slew of others.  The Publication Studio blog also has great pictures of the fair, where you can actually see the books leaving the shelves.

Thanks to Publication Studio and all the others who put the fair together–it was a great day, and I hope it comes again soon.