Printed Matter's Los Angeles Art Book Fair returned to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena for its 13th edition, featuring over 250 exhibitors—slightly fewer than last year—with about a fifth participating for the first time. A common thread across the fair was the archive: publications that excavate, remix, and repurpose historical media, from a book chronicling a 1960s hoax about animal nudity to a compendium of vintage photographs that subvert male subjectivity, and a collection of found photos from abandoned houses in rural Maine. The fair also highlighted diasporic and personal archives, including a Palestinian-American artist's cassette mixtape tracing music from the Middle East and an artist-run press focusing on translation as cultural resistance.
This year's edition matters because it demonstrates how contemporary artists and publishers are using archival materials to collapse time and give historical ephemera new relevance, engaging with themes of identity, diaspora, and cultural memory. The fair's slight scaling back and focus on first-time exhibitors also reflects ongoing shifts in the art book market and the resilience of independent publishing. By centering the archive as both source and subject, the fair underscores the enduring power of printed matter to remix and recontextualize the past for present-day audiences.