This free ‘Outlaw’ book and vinyl festival aims to celebrate the underground

In 2023, James Weigel organized a pop-up book event in Little Tokyo that coincided with the Printed Matter Art Book Fair that was going on simultaneously at Museum of Contemporary Art’s neighboring Geffen Contemporary. 

The event was a success, particularly for vendor Crystal Claire, who operates under the name Nooners Books. 

“We had these huge vendors from Printed Matter running to the ATM to take out more cash to buy more books from Crystal,” Weigel recalls on a recent video call. 

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Now, a year later, the Silver Lake-based Weigel and Vernon-based Claire are parlaying that buzz into the first-ever Analog Outlaw Book and Record Fair, a free daytime event set to take place on Sunday, Sept. 22, at Elysian Valley nightclub Zebulon (which also hosted last year’s LitLit festival). With a bounty of local vendors, including indie publishers like These Days and shops including comics spot Secret Headquarters, Weigel and Claire aim to bring together their circle of specialists in underground and counterculture media. 

“As people who have been selling books or working in bookstores for over a decade, both of us, we know so many other people who are ‘dealing in the gold,’” says Claire on the same video call. “It makes sense to get all of our friends together and have a good time.”

Mark Webber, guitarist from the band Pulp and author of “I’m With Pulp, Are You?,” is scheduled to do a DJ set. His book is coming out on Hat & Beard, who will have a booth at the fair.

Weigel comes from “a family of book hoarders.” Both his grandfather and his mother were printers, so he grew up surrounded by paper and books. “I would go over to friends’ houses and their family would have a single bookshelf and I would be like, where are the rest of your books?” he recalls. 

These days, in addition to the massive collection of books visible in our video conference, Weigel has two storage units stocked with his finds. While he was archiving his treasure trove, Weigel noticed that plenty of what he had wasn’t available online – or if it was, only in low-quality images. “I realized that paper ephemera, mass market paperbacks and these elements that are not antiquarian, get lost, and I’m sitting on a goldmine of this,” he says. 

As a result, Weigel began publishing books under his Bibliomancers imprint that draw from his collection, like the recently released “Occult Eye,” which looks at the art and design associated with 1970s and 1980s esoteric books and Gnostic newspapers. “The reception has been incredible,” says Weigel.

Through these books, he has had the opportunity to meet other collectors, like Claire. 

“You can’t find this on the Internet and if you do, there’s a chance that it could be erased the next day or it’s not a clear photograph,” says Weigel. “People are finding inspiration from these and I feel that what Crystal and I have collected here are book dealers and vendors [whose] focus is archiving this lost ephemera and printed material that just gets lost in the shuffle.”

Claire points out that they’re also part of a community of dealers and collectors who have differing areas of expertise and interest. “Anytime you’re dealing with vintage of anything – I hate to use this word – it’s curated by the person who is doing the collecting and that’s going to come with a point of view based on not only who their customer is, but also what their personal interests are,” she says. 

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She explains that book fairs are an area where focusing on your unique perspective is beneficial. “We’re all doing the same thing, but in such a different way that it’s so complementary when we’re together,” Claire says. “We’re really covering all corners of all interests.”

Claire’s own niche is vintage adult material, which means that it’s extremely challenging to sell pieces from her collection online. “It’s very difficult for me to engage in social media because I can’t really share my content,” she says. “I can’t share what I have. I had to start my own website, because I got kicked off of eBay. So many of these seller websites don’t allow for adult material anymore.”

That was another reason for assembling the show, since marketplaces in the L.A. area often don’t allow for adult material, either. Analog Outlaw, which will be held at a 21+ venue, was conceived in part to make space for works that might risk censorship on other platforms, an issue that’s certainly not limited to risqué images. 

“It’s so hard for me to imagine being in the place where you think that censorship is positive,” says Claire. 

Primarily, Analog Outlaw is a fair by and for book people with the aim of making connections with likeminded people. “We’re trying to form a nexus or a bridge to all the people like ourselves across the country,” says Weigel, a self-described “book magnet.”

“Once you become a book person,” he says, “books start finding you.”