Dallas Art Book Fair Showcases Unique Indie Publishing Gems

The Dallas Art Book Fair brought indie publishers, zines, and artists together, showcasing unique books, comics, and creative works from nearly 50 vendors.

on Mar 19, 2025

This past weekend, the Dallas Contemporary played host to the Dallas Art Book Fair, a two-day annual festival that gathers a variety of independent book publishers, amateur zines, and visual artists in a market. We stopped by the event on Saturday and browsed tables from local sellers like Deep Vellum and BLACKLIT, as well as a national selection of weird creative offerings.

Some of the most impressive stuff we spotted from the nearly 50 vendors' selection below.

A Look At Public Napping In Asia, Jessica Winniford Jessica Winniford

served as a photographer and designer for The Chapel, a humanitarian nonprofit headquartered in Asia. Covering 2012-2019, Winniford documented her time partly by using a series of street photos that captured locals napping on sidewalks, job counters, massage chairs and even standing on trains. Each napper with one ambition, she writes on her website. To step away from the stress of their never-ending work day and simply breathe. What if we could simply disconnect where we are, breathe deep, shut our tired eyes and release?

So We Party in Deep Ellum and So I Work in Deep Ellum, Rosalind Bellamy-Hicks Target audience! If there are two things we identify with at the Observer, it's partying and working in Deep Ellum. Rosalind Bellamy-Hicks' cartoon illustrations of Dallas institutions like Deep Ellum Art Co., the Traveling Man statue, and the toilet wall at Double Wide create a kind of present nostalgia in us. It's an oxymoron, but so is experiencing familiarity rendered in a way you've never experienced before.

Endless Monsoon, Sarah Welch For as much as we love a good ol' indie zine, too many of them are simply brief anthologies of art. Sarah Welch's Endless Monsoon was a standout coming-of-age comic series presented in five 50-page issues. It has the dimensions of a DIY zine, about five by 7 inches, but with the kind of artwork you’d see in an Image comic and the same sort of storytelling. Welch’s story follows Jess, the young adult protagonist, as she travels through Southeast Texas in search of a stable life. It’s presented in an almost monochrome fashion, with each page graced with a light green soy-based ink.

We reread the entire series over post-fair coffee, and it was an hour well spent and worth its weight in the dough, with single issues going for $10 a piece or all $35 worth of the complete run.

DERPS Collection, The Cauldron Press It isn't any secret where basketball's heart lays. The Oklahoma City-based risograph print studio stands behind local heroes Thunder, currently leading NBA Western Conference competition at a season-leading 56-12 record. The team's captain and favorite to capture league MVP, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, has his own card in the firm's DERPS Collection of custom-designed NBA trading cards.

Pokemon-inspired, the cards are available in specialty booster packs that may include Gilgeous-Alexander or another upstart star such as Ja Morant or Anthony Edwards. Win Free Stuff!, Michael Scott Griffith Independent creative spaces must always be collaborative, and artist Michael Scott Griffith made sure this weekend's activities were particularly so. Alongside his table full of teeny comedy zines on the Houston Astros cheating and Spotify playlists with only covers of Radiohead's Creep, Griffith had a Win Free Stuff machine. It appeared to be one of those short-term tattoo machines you'd find in corners of restaurants, where depositing 50 cents could get you a peel-and-press Spiderman photo.

This time, those two quarters were worth a coupon to redeem at another table at the event, good for items such as stickers or buttons. Rejected Pro Wrestlers, Konstantine Soldatos We opened one page of this zine and were immediately confronted with a ripped caricature of a sleazy pastor called Stone Cold Joel Osteen, one of 10 pages of fictional renderings and descriptions of unsung warriors from the undercard. It’s hard to find an easier sell than that. Artist Konstantine Soldatos adds an equal dose of pro wrestling in-jokes with tasty comic whimsy to his three volumes of Rejected Pro Wrestlers, which we believe has a lot of potential as a coffee table book.