Last Sunday, when most of New York City's inhabitants were curled up with their Kindles, fans of rare and beautiful paper books trudged through torrential snow to the one-day-only Karma Book Market. Located on Great Jones Street, Karma, a gallery and bookstore, sells everything from scarce artist tomes from OC friend Ryan McGinley to paintings by Torey Thornton and Jean-Baptiste Bernadet. For the market, Karma called in the downtown scene’s biggest bibliophiles including Fulton Ryder, Primary Information, Printed Matter, and White Columns to set up booths and showcase their finds while DJs spun tracks as good for dancing as for reading.
Now let’s get to the good stuff: what I found. The books on display at Karma all but proved there's something about printed paper that digital screens will never match. Take a limited edition, deluxe copy of Christopher Wool’s East Broadway Breakdown that I spotted at Harper’s Books. Owner Harper Levine explained how each edition came with a small copy of one of the photos included in the series. Because Wool makes a point of very rarely (if ever) reproducing his photographs, Levine mused that purchasing this deluxe edition might be one of the only feasible ways to get your hands on a Wool original photograph.
Next, I stopped by 6 Decades Books, a store The New York Times once called “the scrappy newcomer” of the art book scene, where I found an old Harmony Korine zine from the 90s. Jeremy Sanders, the owner of the now-matured art book supplier, explained how this zine, which was filled with photocopied self-portraits and offensive scrawlings from the controversial artist and director, was created after Kids had been shot and edited, but before it had been officially released. Conceived with the help of Larry Clark, this zine was a particularly rare find not only because Harmony’s printed work was never commercially distributed, but also because the artist himself lost most of his early work in a terrible apartment fire a few years ago.
Before I made my way back out into the icy tundra, I scooted over to Hassla Books where my eye caught sight of one of my favorite books from the whole day: a work titled Six Six Packs by David Schoerner filled with still life shots of beers. Unexplained and unique, it was the perfect personification of the market and an ideal sendoff.
![]()
Visitors browsed Karma's own books
![]()
Works by HARMONY KORINE
![]()
Now let’s get to the good stuff: what I found. The books on display at Karma all but proved there's something about printed paper that digital screens will never match. Take a limited edition, deluxe copy of Christopher Wool’s East Broadway Breakdown that I spotted at Harper’s Books. Owner Harper Levine explained how each edition came with a small copy of one of the photos included in the series. Because Wool makes a point of very rarely (if ever) reproducing his photographs, Levine mused that purchasing this deluxe edition might be one of the only feasible ways to get your hands on a Wool original photograph.
Next, I stopped by 6 Decades Books, a store The New York Times once called “the scrappy newcomer” of the art book scene, where I found an old Harmony Korine zine from the 90s. Jeremy Sanders, the owner of the now-matured art book supplier, explained how this zine, which was filled with photocopied self-portraits and offensive scrawlings from the controversial artist and director, was created after Kids had been shot and edited, but before it had been officially released. Conceived with the help of Larry Clark, this zine was a particularly rare find not only because Harmony’s printed work was never commercially distributed, but also because the artist himself lost most of his early work in a terrible apartment fire a few years ago.
Before I made my way back out into the icy tundra, I scooted over to Hassla Books where my eye caught sight of one of my favorite books from the whole day: a work titled Six Six Packs by David Schoerner filled with still life shots of beers. Unexplained and unique, it was the perfect personification of the market and an ideal sendoff.
Visitors browsed Karma's own books
Works by HARMONY KORINE
