The first thing I heard while roaming the stalls at Analog Outlaw Book and Record Fair last September was “Wicked,” a Psychic TV track that came out at the cusp of the 1980s and 1990s. It’s this seemingly endless, loopy acid house number— I hesitate to call it a song— that appeals to a very specific kind of weirdo who collects the fruits of the Throbbing Gristle family tree and spends their free time reading about cults and psychedelics and psychedelic cults. So, if you’re that type of weirdo and you hear “Wicked” out in the wild, you know you’ve found your people.
And, yes, dear reader, I did find my people that day. Organized by Bibliomancers and Nooners Books, Analog Outlaw is a counterculture physical media marketplace. At the inaugural event, held at Zebulon last year, vendors from vintage issues of Rolling Stone to Goblin on vinyl and Frankenhooker on VHS to paperback porn. Mark Webber from Pulp was on hand to sign copies of his book, I’m With Pulp, Are You? I can’t even remember how many club pals I ran into that day. It was one of those events where you spend half the time hunting for treasure and the other half showing your friends what you found.
For their second fair, on June 28, Analog Outlaw is moving to a larger venue, 2220 Arts + Archives. The roster includes mix of vintage media vendors and indie publishers, amongst them Hat & Beard Press, horror zine Midnight Companions and Neither Neither Books, as well as the first West Coast appearance of Japanese Avant Garde Books.
“What we’re creating here is this pocket community of folks that love outsider culture and folklore and adult material and fringe weird art communities that existed in the ‘70s and still have connections to the community now,” says James Weigel of Bibliomancers. “There are all these components that didn’t have a home anywhere else.”
I first interviewed Weigel and Crystal Claire of Nooners prior to the first Analog Outlaw event for Southern California News Group’s papers. Back then, they told me about how part of the initial concept was to provide a space where vendors would not have to censor their goods. That mission seems more important now that we’ve been thrust back into Trump’s timeline. “There is a lot of anxiety,” says Claire, “and I’ve talked to a lot of other people who deal in the same material about that kind of irrational fear of getting wrangled up and thrown into some gulag because you have a Penthouse.”
But, Weigel points out, there is also a new generation of physical media collectors who are specifically looking for vintage adult or occult material, but have difficulty finding much of anything online. “Online, it’s pretty much impossible to find any vintage pornography or adult,” he says. “Occult material is now getting in this thing where that’s expanded to the point where everyone is marking up everything they have with some outrageous pricing, so a lot of the vendors that we’re having come through are very niche and a lot of them only deal with certain facets of esoteric or occult books and they are not trying to charge some antiquarian pricing for it.”
Analog Outlaw came to life at a junction where physical and social media meet. Weigel, who also runs the popular Instagram account Astraleyes, diligently archives and shares the materials in his own physical media collections online and, through that, has met plenty of other collectors. “What I’m finding with Analog Outlaw is this extension of what Crystal and I have created separately with our own social media personas,” he says.
But, as interest in Analog Outlaw spreads outside of Los Angeles, it’s quickly become a project with deeper roots IRL than on social. “I feel that with the end goal there’s this thing where we can eventually take it off social media where we can just exist in the sphere where paper and all these dead media are thriving,” says Weigel, adding that he doesn’t put his popular Bibliomancers book releases online. “You have to buy a physical copy. You have to be engaged in that community and I feel like Analog Outlaw is becoming this home for that.”
Part of the fun, too, for the Analog Outlaw team, is showing how many people will come out to a niche book fair. “Everyone always thinks , oh well, book stores are dying or no one reads books anymore,” says Claire. “There are actually a lot of us out here. There are actually way more than we can fit at 2220.”
The future doesn’t have to be an AI-generated, always-online world and Weigel and Claire are helping build a space for those who still care about work made by humans and released as tangible objects. The two have talked about taking Analog Outlaw on the road and, that could happen, but, in the meantime, they’re planning to put together a print directory of physical media vendors.
“I think this is a way for people who can’t afford websites, don’t want to deal with it, maybe just are too old to be online. I do know a lot of older book dealers who don’t know how to deal with social media or don’t know how to format their websites,” says Claire.
“And younger generations that don’t have any interest in social media,” adds Weigel.
TBH, it also sounds like a good idea for those of us who fall somewhere in the middle and just need a break from the infinite scroll. “There’s just so much stuff,” says Claire. “There’s so much internet that I think people are burnt out on it.”
Analog Outlaw is Saturday, June 28 at 2220 Arts+Archives (2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles 90057) from 12 p.m. until 5 p.m. Click for info on Dice.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates. Subscribe to the weekly Beatique newsletter.
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