When you hear the term “art book,” what do you think? Do you imagine a gleaming, high-end store exclusively for sophisticates, academics, and design geeks? Do you reflexively visualize a heavy, clunky publication that never moves from the same spot on your living room table? Or do you just pine for all the beautiful-looking books that are too expensive and unwieldy for you ever to display in your tiny apartment?
“The ‘art book’ moniker is used as somewhat of a generic term that can be pliable and that people can identify with,” Valentine says. “We’ve made some efforts to make it an open term.”
Valentine sees CABF as an addition to an already rich community rather than as a replacement or rival. He mentions Zine Fest and CAKE, the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, as evidence of the city’s fertile self-publishing and art-publishing scenes. Still, he hopes CABF can become an institution in its own right, albeit one that upends assumptions of what “institutions” are.
