Now Browsing | The L.A. Art Book Fair

New Yorkers who love books and art look forward each year to Printed Matter’s N.Y. Art Book Fair. Now the event has a West Coast companion: Printed Matter’s first L.A. Art Book Fair opens today, at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary space in downtown Los Angeles. The fair’s director, AA Bronson, is an artist who is the former president of Printed Matter, a nonprofit organization devoted to publications by artists, and who conceived the original fair in 2005.

Bronson has long wanted to bring the art book fair to L.A., because it is where so many of his New York exhibitors are based. “Los Angeles is a hotbed of alternative publishing,” he says, “even though many people in the art world might not think of L.A. as a serious place for publishing.” Putting to rest once and for all the notion that Angelenos don’t read and that they all spend their time surfing or perfecting their tans, Bronson has assembled an impressive roster of exhibitors (220 from over 21 countries), events and special installations for the fair’s L.A. debut.

The online bookshop Book Stand’s display focuses on books about plants, including “the southwest,” a new booklet featuring the artist Ye Rin Mok’s photographs of unusual vegetation that she encountered on an impromptu drive through Utah and Arizona. Marc Jacobs’s Bookmarc, one of L.A.’s few independent bookstores, will host a book signing with the illustrator Jean-Philippe Delhomme for “The Unknown Hipster Diaries,” and small Los Angeles publishers like Iko Iko, other wild, and the L.A. Forum for Architecture and Urbanism will display their wares alongside those of many of the city’s museums. Because L.A. is considered “the center of the zine universe,” says Bronson, he invited the curator Darin Klein to organize “Zine World,” a series of exhibitions and events focusing on cult classics like “Skate Fate” and “Bedwetter,” while Printed Matter added an exhibition of pioneering zine makers like Raymond Pettibon, Dash Snow, Mark Gonzalez and Ari Marcopoulos.

The L.A. Art Book Fair is a “smorgasbord for sure,” says Bronson, who hopes it will become an annual event. “It’s become its own thing. We knew it would be very different from the N.Y. fair and we didn’t try to shape it, but allowed it to take its own shape. There are lots of layers to the city’s art book world that are waiting to be discovered.”

The fair is free and open to the public from Feb. 1 through Feb. 3 at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, 152 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles. See the book fair’s Web site for detailed event schedules as well as a list of neighborhood restaurants.