small haul
books and more from Berlin's 2025 Miss Read artists' book fair
Not last weekend but the one before that, Miss Read was held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. HKW is a monumental building designed by an American architect, gifted to the city of Berlin in 1957 for use as a conference hall, in 1963 JFK spoke in its auditorium, and then in 1980 its roof caved in and tragically killed a radio journalist working inside. The roof was rebuilt and HKW was founded as the building’s new tenant in 1989 right before the fall of the wall. For the past few years, HKW has been the annual home to Miss Read — and because of the faultiness of English phonetics we’re still uncertain whether ‘read’ is the verb or its participle.
Since I’m in Berlin this summer doing a residency at ZK/U, I had the chance to visit Miss Read and, in typical Darian fashion, got sucked in immediately. There were a couple hundred tables of almost exclusively small presses and independent publishers. Most were from Germany, but also many from around Europe, the States, and Latin America. Like at any book fair, I encountered many many more titles that I would have loved to collect, but working on a fixed budget of about 150 euros, I had choices to make.
In today’s post I’ll share my small haul with you. I wanted to share this before, but the emergencies of the world made that hard. Watching Iran get bombarded from afar and having frustrating conversations with family about the political, human, and ecological implications of zionist aggression made sharing my book haul a lesser priority, but still I feel the desire to share these with you in the hope that you resonate with the titles or want to learn more the publishers.
Sonnet(s), Ulises Carrión (IN-OUT PRODUCTIONS, Amsterdam, 1972 / Ugly Duckling Presse, New York, 2020)
Ulises Carrión — conceptual artist, artists’ book king, homosexual itinerant, jarocho de los Tuxtlas who in 1972 published 44 versions of a single sonnet written by the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The permutations Carrión created were procedural, typographic, and stylistic. I love this book because it makes me think how form converses with the ‘essence’ of a work and the meaning it makes. Ugly Duckling’s republished edition is supplemented by new essays in response to Carrión’s bookworks and is a joy to admire and read.
espacio, Mauricio Amarante (FRISSONS, Bruxelles, 2021)
FRISSONS showed up at Miss Read with a suite of cassettes running the gamut from dreamy synths to reverberated metal, and they brought a walkman player to offer the chance to browse by listening. I gravitated immediately toward espacio and when I heard its ambient, atmospheric, drifting notes I knew that this was the cassette for me. Mauricio Amarante made the score for the 2021 exhibition “une signe dans l’espace” in Bruxelles, which gathered artists around the idea of “le fantasme spatial.” I find the tracks to be haunting like how my surroundings and I drift together as I find my way between day dreams. This is perhaps the fourth cassette I’ve collected and now all I need to find is a device to play them on at home (and a home for that matter, too 😅)
Foto n°351, Verónica Garay (FAC Zine y Publicaciones, Barcelona, 2023)
FAC is a Barcelona-based publishing collective run by two Chilean artists Verónica and Francisca, working primarily with photography and the freeing space of the zine. Sometimes when I walk around book fairs I feel drawn to tables for the energy of the people, not to mention the quality of their craft, and this time I was definitely drawn to FAC and their warmth and DIY ethos. I found this beautiful postcard-size photo print by Verónica, who told me how it was a rock she passed in the Atacama desert. The dramatic light and shadow in this photo paired with the simplicity of its composition really spoke to me.
no need to know / infinite belowness, Ami Xherro & Benjamin de Boer (solipCYST, Toronto, 2025)
Kess was in Berlin tabling as solipCYST, their new DIY publishing practice in which they work with poets to make small home-made editions. Over the past year Kess has accomplished the feat of producing about a dozen different poetry chapbooks and zines and they were sweet enough to gift me a copy of each edition from their catalogue. I read through all of them on the lawn outside of HKW taking a very necessary book fair-break, and this chapbook by fellow Toronto poets Ami Xherro and Benjamin de Boer was one of my faves.
Una casa lejos de casa, Clara Obligado (EME Editorial, La Plata, 2023)
On the Saturday of Miss Read I attended an afternoon of book talks that all happened to be held by latin american publishers. The first one was a conversation with Argentinian author Clara Obligado around her two recent books “Una casa lejos de casa” and “Todo lo que crece. Naturaleza y escritura.” Obligado spoke about her exile in Spain following Argentina’s military coup of ‘76, the malleable and political nature of Spanish language, the practice of a teaching writer and writing teacher, and the feeling of ubiquitous alteridad as a forever extranjera. Always being an ‘other’ is a feeling I related deeply to, so I decided to buy this book. Part memoir, part essay, part social commentary: I’m excited to dig into this book when its turn comes.
Genda #3. Endless scenarios, edited by Amedeo Martegani & Silvia Ponzoni (A&M Edizioni, Milano, 2019)
The only book I bought on the last day of the fair. I was attracted to A&M’s table full of finely crafted photo books and contemporary art publications, and particularly to the set of three titles in the Genda series, which publishes photographers from Italy and China around a shared open-ended theme. As self-identified landscape nerd I obviously was attracted to the edition Endless scenarios which treats landscape in quite unconventional and surprising ways — as seen the interiors of auditoriums, building demolitions, and shots from inside moving cars. While it’s easy to frame this project as a dialogue between east and west, I think it’s more interesting to see it as a part of a millenary exchange between Italian and Chinese cultures. On another note, I’m obsessed with its paper and printing by Grafiche dell’Artiere.
La Condición Postnatural: Glosario de ecologías para otros mundos posibles, editado por cthulu books (Institute for Postnatural Studies, Madrid, 2024)
Since learning about the Institute for Postnatural Studies through my friends in the Queer Ecologies Research Collective, I’ve been a big fan of the ludic educational programming revolving around IPS. La condición postnatural is a collection of essays that together lay out a platform for postnaturalism as a critical framework against and around the enlightenment idea of ‘nature’ as the site for rationalization, control, extraction, classification, and objectification. With section headings like “Exocizando mundos,” “Llorar-los-mundos-con,” “Plantacionoceno,” and “Compostismo,” I’ve been waiting to get my hands on this glossary for over a year and I’m so happy it found me at Miss Read.
Katabasis, Lulu MacDonald & Maik Gräf (Sofort Books, Hamburg, 2024)
I was happily surprised to come across a healthy amount of Alternative Process photography at Miss Read, including a few editions of chemigrams and photograms like this one by Sofort Books. Gräf and MacDonald’s chemigrams remind me of my dear friend and collaborator Danielle Goshay’s own abstract camera-less photographs. I love supporting work like this because a) it’s gorgeous, b) it’s conceptual without pretention, and c) I find solidarity between people making weird art. Photograms are kind of inherently esoteric, verging on the occult, speaking to the material chaos embedded in the photochemical process. The pages of the book are japanese folded with light weight translucent paper. Since some pages have an image printed inside and outside, subtle silhouettes bleed through, creating haunting layers and an unusual way to read this book.
Arqueología del presente, Pablo Rugiero (Atelier Burano, Buenos Aires, 2023)
Where weird art, unusual landscapes, and fine artists’ books meet is this large format edition by Argentinian Berlin-based artist Pablo Rugiero. All of Atelier Burano’s books, prints and multiples were beautifully crafted, and I especially loved this one because of how the artist framed their graphite rubbings of the built environment in terms of landscape, memory, and materiality. Each piece is reproduced in the book at the same scale as they were collected in situ in Buenos Aires, making the book a kind of Borjesian atlas full of abstract topographic scans of the city. The embossed cover adds texture, and I feel extremely invited to make a rubbing of my own on its textured surface.
La Pastèque v.1, (Publishers for Palestine, worldwide, 2025)
Distributed by Galerie Carole Kvasnevski for free or by donation, the french version of La Pastèque brings Palestinian liberation into the context of German zionism that is stiffling dissent and has created a culture of fear, especially in the arts and literature. Fortunately, this publication was not alone in representing solidarity with Palestine at Miss Read as many publishers spoke openly, albeit trepidaciously, against the genocide and the bombardment of Iranian that broke out that weekend. As an Iranian diaspora writer, I cannot understand my freedom without that of Palestine. While I understand Iranians who don’t share this perspective, I find their stance to be deeply troubling and misguided. I was really happy to see a gallery bringing this journal to the book fair.
Anyways, that’s my small haul from Miss Read 2025. I don’t want to leave you on such a dower note, so I’d like to share a new web publication made by my pals Danielle Goshay and Nicholas di Benedetto. AdlerIdhees is an esoteric amalgam of poetry, prose, and photography beautifully transposed to the online viewing format. And I’ll end here by mentioning that I am approaching one month in Berlin and that my next post will be a midway dispatch from my residency at ZK/U!
Thank you for reading this far and until next time,
Darian xx