Magazines, Music, and Paper-Making, Oh My!

It was a little geeky walking in the door. People dressed up in ridiculous paper-made robot costumes greeted us as we stepped in. Of course, a few steps beyond them, walking into a veritable maze of people and magazines, I completely geeked out, too.

On Friday evening, Liz, Matt, and I met up at the Printer's Row Ball at Columbia College. The lit dork in me was jumping up and down about going before we even got there. Stacks upon stacks of back issues of cool magazines? Posters and cool graphic design work? Photography and papermaking and broadsides? Please, count me in!

The event is held annually by Poetry Magazine, and GapersBlock.com usually has a presence (at least, I think they usually do). While, to me, the print presence was much stronger than the digital presence, I'm always happy to discover that there's such a plethora of local magazines. Gapers Block presented a slideshow of Chicago's online lit sites, but we either left before it or missed it while we were upstairs oohing and ahhing over the printing press demonstrations, and the really cool paper art exhibit (see picture). I honestly was surprised by the number of small publications coming out of Chicago that I'd never heard of. I grabbed magazine after magazine as we weaved in and out of heaping tables of back issues. (Not that all of the periodicals were local, of course.) I have visions of tearing them up and making some kind of Chicago-based art piece out of them (but I get these visions all the time, and usually I just get to busy, or opt to write instead).

So, the first floor had most of the magazines, as well as a music stage with a DJ spinning, and free drinks and appetizers at the far side. After moseying about for a bit, we headed up to the second floor. This was really the print-making floor. Several volunteers were working huge presses, and you could print out a piece of art if you wanted. In another room, about fifteen people crowded around tables filled with scraps of rubber and wooden blocks--they were making rubber stamps. Having had (nerd alert) a large rubber stamp collection as a kid, I was pretty excited. But our scissors were pretty awful, and all the good pieces of rubber were gone. So, I wound up with a failed attempt at a sun that looked akin to a kindergarten project.

Rubber stamp making

We wandered around looking at paper art and photography, and were on a rather fruitless search for the elevator when I noticed columns of paper discs suspeneded from the ceiling in one of the rooms. We went in and walked through the columns, and took pictures of them and each other in them for about fifteen minutes or so. It was a very relaxing and quite fascinating exhibit.

On the eighth floor, which wasn't much different from the first floor, only sized down, we saw people carrying huge bags of magazines around with them. I was having a difficult enough time just keeping hold of my stack of five, much less dragging a huge bag around everywhere. No offense, but those people just got a little too into it.

Row of bottles at Eleven City Diner

After making our way back downstairs, we went next door to Eleven City Diner, to which I'd never been before. I actually wasn't very hungry, but Liz and I split the Moshe Cristo sandwich. Okay, whoever decided to put a sandwich on French Toast was a genius! It was ham, roast turkey, and melted Swiss on Challah French Toast---mmmm, so delicious! Top that off with Wisconsin cheddar cheese fries, and I was one happy camper (who was trying not to think about the number of calories in the meal). Needless to say, I felt pretty good when we left for the train.