Printed Matter

I’ve been to a lot of bookstores. Ones where dust danced in the light. Ones with charmingly creaky floors. Ones with resident cats. But I’ve never been to a bookstore like Printed Matter, a non-profit shop on the westernmost edge of Chelsea that’s dedicated to artists’ books. Printed Matter is something most bookstores simply aren’t: cool. And, in it, I became something I’m usually not: intimidated.

Founded in 1976, Printed Matter has bounced around various Manhattan locations – Tribeca, SoHo, Chelsea, Chelsea again – before landing in its glorious 11th Avenue space in 2015. The store’s humble exterior belies an impressive interior – one that gets bigger, chicer, and zanier the further back you go. There are curlicue stairs with an industrial edge, artwork being installed before my eyes, busy staffers archiving and preserving, and a second-floor mezzanine with a vibe that’s one part old-world library, one part college gymnasium. It’s like Housing Works, but for black-clad, Helmut Lang-wearing types.

Printed Matter takes care to distinguish between art books (the kind that aspirationally dot my coffee table, ultimately succumbing to takeout stains) and artists’ books. On its website, the difference is described this way: “Unlike an art book, catalog or monograph that tend to showcase artworks created in another medium, the term ‘artists’ books’ refers to publications that have been conceived as artworks in their own right. These ‘projects for the page’ are generally inexpensive, often produced in large or open editions, and are democratically available.” It’s a distinction I never previously considered or understood, but it explains why Printed Matter feels the way it does – not like a sterile, minimalist temple but like the inner life of the most talented and disaffected person you knew in high school. I’d venture that the person who wrote all over their Converse soles in tenth grade chemistry is the same person who grows up to peruse the back-catalogs of self-published art zines.

At Printed Matter, my usual go-to comfort zone (aka literary fiction) was nowhere to be found. In its place is a mecca of alternative publishing – small presses and monographs and chapbooks and flipbooks galore. In addition to more than 15,000 books, the shop abounds with artistic ephemera: Jenny Holzer truisms stamped onto wooden postcards, bound copies of every vote cast in the 2016 presidential election, and political posters that would be at home at a Trump protest or Women’s March. All told, I spent more than an hour wading through the eclectic stacks and shelves of Printed Matter, flitting from one fascinating item to another, considering whether what my bookshelves need most right now is a book of bare breasts, one artist’s recollection of a lifetime of unwanted sexual advances, or, more likely, neither. If you were being uncharitable, you might say I lingered to the point of loitering and left only reluctantly when the space closed for a private event. The place is a lot to take in, but it’s incredible.