Kicking off today is the Room & Book ICA Art Book Fair, a mega book fest in collaboration with Claire de Rouen Books bringing together zine aficionados, legendary specialists, magazine experts, and artist book connoisseurs from around the world, all under the one roof for three days.

Alongside Claire de Rouen Books, showing at the fair will be the likes of Elegantly Papered, Koenig Books, Louis Vuitton Maison Librarie, Simon Finch, Maggs Bros, Quaritch and 20th Century Art Archives – and Arthur Fournier Fine & Rare.

Arthur Fournier is a Boston-based book dealer and specialist in US underground punk, hip hop and experimental electro who has made the trek to London for this weekend’s event. Closest to Fournier’s heart are the independent magazines and fanzines that emerged at the height of the punk rock scene in California and Massachusetts the late 1970s to mid 1980s. Think Damage, Slash, No Magazine, and Forced Exposure – titles born out of a love for the likes of Black Flag, Minor Threat, Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch and SSD Control, starting as bedroom productions and in some cases amassing cult followings to rival some of the more mainstream independent music titles of the time. 

Fournier will be bringing a drool-worthy selection of some of the above titled books to the fair this weekend. If you do get down, make sure you nab him for a chin-wag – this guy’s a goldmine and will fill you in on everything from underground and avant garde to the punk-poetry connection and the how the beats funded the rise of some punk papers…

TN: So in this day and age, how do you actually become a book dealer?
Arthur Fournier: I was working in publishing in New York from 2001-2009 but I’d always been a book collector. I’d never passed a book store or flea market without cruising in and looking for some sort of interesting material. And what I found most interesting was counter culture. In 2008 I met a venerable book dealer in the antiquarian book market. He invited me to keep in touch and was interested in my perspective on rare books as a younger person – as the antiquarian book trade until recently has very much been an older gentleman’s game. He eventually offered me a job in Boston, so I moved to New England.

TN: And recently you started your own company?
AF: Yes, quite recently. I participated in the Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair earlier this year and the response was great, so it struck me that I should deal books under my own name.

TN: You mentioned counter culture, is that the main area you’re focussed on?
AF: Some people really hate the word, you know, they say “It’s all culture, why do you need to ghetto-ise it?” and I’m cautious of using the word too categorically. But what I mean I guess is alternative narratives. I’m interested in how the world of print functions. We’re all digital natives now, the internet is this sea of information and there’s a torrent of data about music, literature, visual art, fashion, sexuality that just washes through us. But there was a time, until very recently, around 1998, when all of that information about culture circulated in print. From the earliest origins to photocopiers and putting together your own fanzine in your bedroom. I’m interested in people who have used print to communicate alternative and subversive narratives and connect to like minded people.

Arthur Fournier on Damage: “Damage ranks alongside Slash magazine and Search & Destroy in its importance for establishing and recording the West Coast punk aesthetic.”

TN: Talking about these kids making fanzines in their bedrooms. In comparison to the Tumblr; Soundcloud; blog generation of today would you say there’s a more personal element to print?
AF: Yeah I would say that, particularly when it’s DIY print. You often have people who are learning graphic design or type setting as they go. I mean, that happens online too but the sweet spot for me is when you have somebody who is so passionate about a scene or place or whatever freak scene it is that they had to put it on paper. That happened a lot around music in the 1970s when certainly the mainstream media was not interested in self-taught musicians, teenagers doing drugs and running riot, but there was a worldwide wave of kids that used the fact that the barriers of entry to printing a book had dropped to almost nothing. It used to take a lot to print a sheet of paper, but in the post war period in the Americas and Europe and other areas around the world you had offset photography, mimeography, risograph machines where someone in your community could afford to own one of these things, you could even have one in your basement.

TN: So what kind of fanzines are your favourites, which are you bringing to Room & Book?
AF: One of the ones I really love is called Forced Exposure. It still actually exists and is one of the most important distribution channels for independent, experimental music in the United States. They still have an incredible trade in underground music. They started out as a Boston hardcore fanzine and their first issues were looking at the likes of SSD Control and Minor Threat – a particular register of punk music. Then very slowly after the first four or five issues started to open up from this very narrow band of music to really strange names, like Nick Cave and The Birthday Party and Diamanda Galás; music you wouldn’t necessarily call punk.

Forced Exposure, independent music zine circa early 1980s to 1993. Arthur Fournier: “Forced Exposure began its run as the quintessential New England hardcore magazine and eventually turned its focus to more global horizons and outré genres.”

TN: How long does it keep going on like this?
AF: Forced Exposure starts in 1982, in a bedroom somewhere in Massachusetts and it goes on to chart an entire decade of change in the music industry and in global popular culture. The first issue they printed maybe like 5000 copies, and by 1993 they’re printing over 40,000 copies. They guys behind it, Jimmy Johnson and Byron Coley, then turned it into something more lucrative, a full on music distribution channel.

TN: So it really followed the rise of the punk scene in that context…
AF: Absolutely. You could say it followed, or even led it. It’s not like the rise of punk music or hardcore music from an underground phenomenon to a mainstream phenomenon was a foregone conclusion. When that music came out and there were twenty people in a basement somewhere listening to it, we knew in 2014 museums would be doing shows about these flyers and people in Tokyo or London or Paris would be collecting them. It was a small faction of people who fully immersed themselves in this scene.

TN: So you mentioned it all starting with the liked of SSD Control and Minor Threat, what other acts were prevalent in some of the other fanzines you collect? Black Flag and the like?
AF: Lydia Lunch, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Black Flag obviously. Also Devo, their graphic and performance sensibilities were mind-blowing.

TN: Was there something these publications were kind of aligning themselves with visually speaking, that tied them together?
AF: Thankfully, no. Punk was a regionalism when it first started. To the outside it may have seemed monolithic. But punk in London was different form punk in New York, and punk in New York was really different from punk in San Francisco, and San Fran punk was totally different to LA punk. All across the US, places like Boston, Texas, Minneapolis, Minnesota, punk had a different look and a different feel. True, people were all drawing from the same sources and kids bought the same records but overall the punk movement is drawing from its predecessors in various avant-garde and underground movements that have been happening since the early 20th century. There are direct connections between dada and surrealism and these music movements. Cabaret Voltaire was a punk band but it was also a place where dada performances happened.

TN: So there are a lot of connections between poetry and punk?
AF: Totally. A great example is Search and Destroy, it was a punk fanzine in the 1970s and 80s that ran for eleven issues. It was started by an employee of City Lights bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s store. Ferlinghetti and ALLEN Ginsberg lent their employee V. Vale fifty dollars to start his fanzine. He then went on to shut it down and start a new magazine called Research, which became incredibly popular in defining what underground, avant-garde culture meant in the late 80s and early 90s. That Research followed a punk magazine that was directly funded by the beats is fascinating.

Room & Book ICA Art Book Fair in collaboration with Claire de Rouen Books runs today, Friday 6th June to Sunday 8th June. Friday at Saturday 11am-8pm, Sunday 11am-6pm. Nash and Brandon Rooms, Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH. Entry £1 with ICA Day Membership.