Printers Row Lit Fest occupied South Dearborn between Ida B. Wells and Polk on September 12 and 13, free, and by most reckonings the largest outdoor literary event in the Midwest. It is also, unusually among the festivals of this Chicago summer, standing precisely where its subject happened.
Printers Row is not a branding exercise. The printing and publishing trade physically operated on those blocks, in buildings that still carry the loading bays and heavy floors it required, and the neighbourhood took its name from the industry rather than from a developer’s prospectus. A book fair on Dearborn is an argument about continuity that most of this city’s festivals cannot make about their own ground.
Why the Address Matters
Consider the alternatives on offer this summer. The Gold Coast Art Fair set 200 artists on a Grant Park lawn sixty-eight years after leaving the neighbourhood that named it. ARC ran four days of Chicago house in a park it shares with whoever books next. Beyond Wonderland rented the best skyline sightline in the city to a franchise that photographs identically in three states.
Against that, a literary festival on the street where the presses ran. One cannot separate the event from the pavement, and the pavement is doing argumentative work — reminding a visitor that publishing was a manufacturing business with a physical location, staffed by people who lived nearby, before it became an industry of email attachments.
The Form Is Underrated
Literary festivals suffer from a reputation for being worthy, which is unjust and partly self-inflicted. The good ones are conversational rather than ceremonial: tables of small presses, secondhand dealers with genuinely odd inventory, and writers obliged to speak without a lectern to hide behind.
The small-press tables are the component worth defending. A publisher operating at a scale of a few hundred copies is making decisions no algorithm would sanction, and an outdoor fair is one of the few remaining places where such a publisher meets a reader directly. The same verification principle that has kept the independent craft market thriving while Etsy hollowed out applies exactly to books.
The programming collision is worth noting for anyone planning ahead: this festival ran the same weekend as the Ravenswood Art Walk and the fall Renegade Craft market. Three of the most rigorous cultural events of the Chicago season, on one September weekend, in three neighbourhoods, and the the published calendars listed them as interchangeable weekend options.
Do not attempt the author stages first; they are crowded and the good ones repeat. Begin at the far south end where the secondhand dealers are, and stay at one table until you have found a book you had not heard of and cannot justify. That transaction is the festival, and it has been happening on that street in one form or another for well over a century.
Cover image: The 41st annual Printers Row Lit Fest will take place Sept. 12-13 and feature more than 200 authors, journalists, poets and screenwriters. Some Jewish authors have objected to the fest being held on Rosh Hashanah.
Zubaer Khan/Sun-Times