Today is the second and final day of the Seattle Art Book Fair at Washington Hall. Hours today are from 12 to 5 PM. Yesterday was fantastic and we are running out of popular titles. As in the past, the stairwells of the fair are filled with spirited prints. These are always a fun element of this great event. Find our table on the second floor directly across from the stage.
Seattle! We're coming your way. Go say Hi to Marc and pick up the latest from Temporary Services / Half Letter Press / Public Collectors / Breakdown Break Down Press. We’ll be on the 2nd floor in front of the stage.
The Seattle Art Book Fair is a FREE festival that celebrates independent publishing, book design, and artist books. The nonprofit event hosts 85+ local, national, and international artists, designers, and organizations and includes talks, activities, art installations.
Washington Hall (153 14th Avenue)
May 9–10, 2026
11am–5pm Sunday mask hours 11am–1pm
Very much looking forward to seeing @halfletterpress and Public Collectors in Ann Arbor this weekend at Paper Paper Art Book Fair hailing from Chicago!
Stock up on all the thoughtful publications coming through these guys @clustermuseum this weekend: 11-5 sat, 12-5 sun 307 N Main St Ann Arbor. #midwestartbookfair #artinprint #artmatters
MICHIGAN! Ann Arbor, to be exact. We are coming to you! Marc will be repping Temporary Services / Half Letter Press this weekend at the new Paper Paper Art Book Fair at Cluster museum on 307 N. Main St, Ann Arbon, MI. Lots of Public Collectors publications, and the latest from Breakdown Break Down Press will be available as well. The fair runs from 11 AM - 5 PM each day (Saturday and Sunday, May 2nd and 3rd) and it's free.
Publishing on your own terms: Independent publishing & small presses
with Brett Bloom
Sunday, May 3
12:30pm PT, 2:30pm CT, 3:30pm ET, 9:30pm CET
atlouisplace.com/practicum
Brett Bloom, co-founder of Temporary Services and Half Letter Press, dives into pathways to independent and grassroots publishing, including starting a small press—providing insight from the practical to personal. How do you launch a small press and then sustain it? How can artists think about distribution and reaching audiences for independently published work? What liberatory potential does independent publishing contain at the intersection of public art and community practice?
Brett Bloom is an artist, publisher, and co-founder of Temporary Services and Half-Letter Press with collaborator Marc Fischer. Based in Ft.Wayne (IN) and Chicago, Temporary Services began in 1998 as an experimental exhibition space in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago before transitioning its focus to publishing as a way of opening art and ideas to new possibilities. Half Letter Press is an endeavor to build long-term support and expanded audiences for people that work creatively in experimental ways. They are particularly interested in supporting people and projects that have had difficulty finding financial and promotional assistance through mainstream commercial channels.
Learn more and Register: atlouisplace.com/practicum
Hey Wisconsin, we'll be at Madison Print & Resist on Saturday, April 25 from 11am to 4pm in the light-filled third floor of the Central Library which is located at 201 W Mifflin St. in Madison, Wisconsin. The event is free and it’s always action-packed and great. Plus we are tabling next to Wisconsin legend John Porcellino. Wow! And in the hallway very close to the bathroom and water fountain too! What's not to love?
What's Back? What Problems Can Artist Publishers Solve?! Plus details on book fairs in Madison, Ann Arbor, and Seattle, plus new distributed publications in our webstore. Read our latest newsletter here: https://mailchi.mp/halfletterpress/what_is_back?e=88b04f5f4f
New distributed title in our webstore: Felipe Ehrenberg’s Testamento ($8.00 from ). We have 12 copies and may not be able to get more so don’t miss out!
Upon discovering this beautiful bilingual (English and Spanish) catalog on the hard to see work of Felipe Ehrenberg, it seemed essential to get some copies for our webstore so others could get a little immersion into his energetic collages. We are grateful to ISLAAA for offering this to us at wholesale so that we could share it with you. Here's what ISLAAA wrote about Ehrenberg and the exhibit this was created for, which was curated by Olivia Casa:
Felipe Ehrenberg (1943–2017) was a Mexican conceptual artist whose multidisciplinary work encompassed performance, mail art, mimeography, installation, painting, and collage. His formative early projects were linked to the Fluxus movement, and he was an innovator of independent artists’ publishing, cofounding the influential Beau Geste Press with Martha Hellion and David Mayor in England in 1968. He was subsequently involved in Mexico’s gruposmovement as a founding member of the artist collective Grupo Proceso Pentágono, alongside Carlos Finck, José Antonio Hernández Amezcua, and Victor Muñoz. At turns acutely political, experimental, and personal, Ehrenberg’s practice as an artist was inextricable from his role as a cultural agent, teacher, writer, and publisher.
The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is pleased to announce the opening of Felipe Ehrenberg: Testamento. This exhibition displays, for the first time, the thirty-four collages in Felipe Ehrenberg’s Testamento (1968–2017), a retrospective and reflective assemblage of documents, photographs, writings, and drawings compiled at the very end of the artist’s decades-long career. A coda to Ehrenberg’s monumental practice, Testamento is also the fourth and final show in ISLAA’s inaugural series of exhibitions devoted to mail art and conceptual practices in Latin America.
New in our webstore from Public Collectors:
The Self-Initiated Hotel Artist Residency
When your studio goes wherever you go, why not take it on the road for a couple nights and give yourself a self-initiated residency in a hotel at cheap off-season rates and see what you make?
From the back cover:
Since founding this project in 2007, Public Collectors has always focused on what can be done informally, without institutional support or validation. This booklet describes how a self-initiated artist residency in a hotel can be a productive creative retreat that doesn’t require an application or invitation.
Artists probably started making art in hotels soon after hotels came into existence. Some hotels today have artist in residence programs where they invite artists to stay in their rooms and use them as studios. This approach depends on the artist receiving an invitation and isn’t open to anyone. Other kinds of artist residencies require applications and can be very expensive if they aren’t funded by the residency program.
In 2024 I started exploring the idea of giving myself a short residency whenever I wanted one by looking at off-season hotel prices in the Midwest, where I live. I started thinking about specific approaches to making that would be well-suited for a hotel room, what I should pack, and how I should structure my brief stay. The idea of a self-residency in a hotel is not novel but every time I say to someone that I’ve done this, they tell me what a useful idea it is and how much they want to try it. Hotel residencies may be particularly enticing for artists that work from home and don’t normally spend money on an off-site studio.
The self-initiated hotel artist residency is for people who think a simple room in an uninspiring place might be just the ticket to complete a project that doesn’t require much more than a quiet place to be. If you can bring your own supplies and inspiration and prefer solitude, sometimes a room without much of a view and a plate of complimentary breakfast might be all you really need to make your work for two or three days.
Just $6.00 from .
