Founded in 1993, Ugly Duckling Presse is a Brooklyn-based nonprofit publisher that produces poetry, translations, experimental nonfiction, performance texts, and books by artists.

The New York Public Library partners with Ugly Duckling Presse to collect chapbooks, small-print periodicals, avant-garde zines, and hand-bound books from readings, book fairs, and shops worldwide. These boutique items are often handmade or printed in extremely limited runs, and document the small-press activity of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Now more than five years into this partnership, the Ugly Duckling Presse Chapbook and Zine Collection spans more than 1,000 items.

Beginning Tuesday, May 28, some items will be on display at NYPL in a new exhibit, Ugly Duckling Presse Chapbook and Zine Collection: Other Presses, Other Places, in the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

This display showcases items collected outside of New York, with texts that come in a variety of eye-catching formats, from matchbook scrolls to accordion-style pamphlets, authored by poets at different stages of their careers, from well-established writers to up-and-comers.

Highlights from the exhibit include:

"The opiate of words" by Logan Esdale [text] & Lara Odell [illustrations]

"St. Anthony" by Jennifer Styperk

"Some bridges migrate" by Scott Pierce, illustrations by Cherie Weaver

"What I don't know for sure" by Phil Demise

"mein flurbuch = [my cadastre]" by Uljana Wolf, translated by Nathaniel Otting
 

This post was co-written with Miriam Gianni, General Research Division, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.