One force behind the rise of these fairs was Shannon Michael Cane, an exuberant, heavily tattooed Australian expatriate and autodidact book aficionado who in 2013 took over the Printed Matter book fair in New York, the granddaddy of such gatherings. He proceeded to transform it into a radically inclusive affair, attended by venerable rare-book dealers alongside obscure zine makers so scrappy that they could barely afford the plane fare to participate.