Alternative publishers poured into San Francisco's Golden Gate Park to attend the Anarchist Bookfair, the country's largest gathering of anarchist publishers, distributors and enthusiasts, on March 27.
Now in its fourth year, the fair is strictly invitational. Fair organizer Tom Brooker told PW that this year's event was sold out, with 62 booksellers and distributors attending, among them City Lights, Last Gasp, AK Distributors and Small Press Distribution. "For our fifth anniversary next year, we'll have to rent more space," said Brooker.
The goals of the fair, as Brooker put it, are "to disseminate anarchist literature and culture," and, incidentally, to protest against BookExpo and pretty much any other capitalist commercial venture. "We're old-fashioned anarchists," explained Brooker. "It's about class struggle and the distribution of wealth." The fair is sponsored by the San Francisco-based Bound Together Books, a 25-year-old anarchist bookstore collective of roughly 40 members, and it is free and open to the public.
Whereas the event brought in about 500 people and 40 booksellers in its first year, this year's show saw between 2000 and 3000 people.
Peter Marazelis of the San Francisco-based bookstore/publisher City Lights reported that this was the anarchists' most successful show. "We sold a lot of books," he added. "But mainly it's good public outreach."
A short hop away, in San Jose, alternative publishers also turned out for this year's Alternative Press Expo, an annual gathering of comics and graphic novel publishers in late February.
Sponsored by Comic-Con International of San Diego, APE is in its sixth year. According to David Glanzer, this year's organizer and director of marketing at Comic-Con, 165 booksellers attended (up from 150 last year), and more than 1800 fans (up from roughly 1300).
"Not bad for an alternative show," Glanzer concluded. APE is the brainchild of Dan Vado of Slave Labor Graphics, who started the expo to focus attention on comics, zines and graphic novels.
This year, APE featured independent publishers such as Zap Comix (which celebrated its 30th anniversary), Internet magazine Salon (its online graphic novel Dark Hotel features many Zap artists) and Slave Labor Graphics. Friends of Lulu, an organization dedicated to promoting women's issues, readers and artists in the comics industry, held panel discussions and promoted its new publication, True Confessions.
Both fairs created a buzz among booksellers, alternative publishers and their readers, presenting two sides of a growing "underground" publishing movement and market.
