Pace Publishing Sells a Facsimile of Paul Thek's Notebook

Booth D7 at MoMA PS1 is not selling a Paul Thek painting. It is selling a facsimile of one composition notebook he filled with marker drawings in 1977, the ink bleeding through to the back of every page, reproduced at 9.75 by 7.5 inches so a stranger can hold what used to sit in a drawer.

Booth D7 Sells One Book About One Notebook

Pace Publishing brought Paul Thek: Notebook 41, 1977 to the New York Art Book Fair rather than a monograph or a catalogue raisonné, a choice that tells you where Pace thinks the interesting Thek material lives. The booth also carries a wider run of titles on the artist, but the notebook facsimile is the object built specifically for a fair crowd that buys books to look at process, not finished paintings.

A gallery known for selling six figure sculpture spending a fair weekend on a 148 page paperback about someone's private notebook is not a rounding error in the business model. It is Pace treating a book fair as a different kind of showroom, one where the product is access to an artist's head instead of a wall piece.

Paul Thek Left More Than 100 Notebooks Behind

Thek filled over 100 notebooks across his career with drawings, diary entries, poetry, correspondence and elaborate transcriptions of philosophy and theology, material he considered artworks in their own right, not sketches for later work. Pace picked Notebook 41, a 1977 composition book, out of that entire archive to reproduce first.

Arthur Jafa kept 200 binders of his own reference material before the New Museum built a show around them, and the comparison is not incidental. Two artists working decades apart both treated a private paper archive as inseparable from the finished work, and both archives are now the thing institutions and galleries reach for once the artist can no longer explain the work themselves.

148 Pages Reproduce Ink Bleeding Through the Back

The facsimile does not clean up what a notebook looks like. Pen ink shows through from the reverse side of thin lined paper, watercolor sits next to grocery list handwriting, and sketches for sculptures share a page with what reads like a private argument with a philosopher Thek was transcribing. Reproducing the bleed through instead of scanning around it is the decision that separates a facsimile from a clean reprint.

Pace's own Torkwase Dyson show, running concurrently in the gallery's West 25th Street space, works from a decade of process the artist built in her own studio before it reached a canvas. Thek's notebook and Dyson's decade of painting studies are different centuries of the same instinct, that the research toward a work is worth showing on its own terms.

Notebook 41 runs 148 pages and measures 9.75 by 7.5 inches, close to the dimensions of the composition book it reproduces. Pace built the object to be handled at the size the original demanded, not shrunk to a coffee table format the way a museum catalogue usually treats an archival document.

Twenty Years Since Printed Matter Ran Its First Fair in Chelsea

NYABF 2026 runs September 25 through 27, its Opening Night held the evening before, and the edition lands on a double anniversary, fifty years of Printed Matter as an organization and fifty years of MoMA PS1 as an institution, twenty years after the fair itself started in a Chelsea building in 2006. More than 250 exhibitors are showing this year, from self publishing artists to institutional presses like Pace, and the fair's own program runs book launches, lectures and workshops across the full three days instead of confining itself to a trade floor.

A gallery the size of Pace showing up at a fair built around small presses and self publishers is not neutral positioning. It puts a blue chip publishing arm in one aisle with a zine maker selling twenty copies, and the Thek notebook, priced and produced like the small press work surrounding it, is Pace choosing to compete on those terms for one weekend instead of retreating to its own gallery walls.

A fair weekend generates a fraction of what one sculpture sale brings in, so the value Pace is buying is not revenue. It is proximity to a crowd of collectors, curators and independent publishers who might never walk into a Chelsea gallery on a normal Tuesday but will spend three days at MoMA PS1 handling this kind of object with their own hands.