Alex B. Kostiw
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formerlybirds.bsky.social
Alex B. Kostiw
@formerlybirds.bsky.social
68 followers 83 following 62 posts
Draws, writes, designs, makes, teaches: books. Chicago, and elsewhere.
https://tenderly-honestly.com
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formerlybirds.bsky.social
I'm probably going to treat this as its own book form at some point.
Single signature zines dangle from their extra long bookbinding threads.
December 8, 2025 at 2:58 AM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
My proudest music-listening stat: Only 23 people on Tidal listened to Handsome Furs more than I did in 2025.
Tidal 2025 breakdown: "You are Handsome Furs's 24th biggest fan."
December 4, 2025 at 3:21 AM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
Detroit Art Book Fair for the second day.
Table full of artist zines.
October 12, 2025 at 4:13 PM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
I wish I could say that one day, I'll be the kind of person who makes all their books as soon as they have prints in hand.

Anywaaay, I'll be at Pretty Good Fest this Saturday, on the first floor of the Chicago Athletic Association, 11–6. It's going to be one fantastic day.
Poster text says I'm exhibiting at Pretty Good Fest 2025, Chicago, Illinois. Books and bookbinding tools, because I'm as always assembling just the number that I need. Jack the cat, my coworker, lounging between my back and the chair back.
October 2, 2025 at 11:11 PM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
Jaye Frances (linktr.ee/jayefrancesi...) took these photos at the Pittsburgh Art Book Fair, and I've never had such lovely documentation of my table...
My table of artist zines and prints. It's me! I looked all right in that buffalo print flannel. Pittsburgh Art Book Fair in the Carnegie Museum of Art through a very cool fish eye lens. I'm chatting with someone about my books in the middle ground of this beautifully composed photo.
September 26, 2025 at 10:00 PM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
Cleanse the feed.
My cat Jack, an orange tabby, is on his back and looking into the camera.
September 23, 2025 at 11:03 PM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
Wrapping up day 1 of the Pittsburgh Art Book Fair at Carnegie Museum of Art. First fair of the fall.
View from behind my exhibitor table of my books and a hand rifling through one.
September 20, 2025 at 8:21 PM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
Home travels.
Sunset over the Hudson near the Tappan Zee bridge. Pink clouds on a dark, forested horizon. The street in the Bronx that I grew up on. View from an airplane window, clouds like cotton balls
September 9, 2025 at 10:55 PM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
I've done a lot of doom reposting lately. Here's a pic of Jack.
An orange cat lying on the floor in a rectangle of sunlight.
July 15, 2025 at 1:08 PM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
The fireflies are pulsing. The cicadas are starting to sing.
I'm holding the corner of a leaf up to show a molted cicada shell.
July 8, 2025 at 4:20 AM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
At the end of my walk, the deer ran across my path, and I heard its hooves on the paved road I was standing on.
Deer lying down in front of an obelisk headstone in a cemetery.
July 3, 2025 at 4:46 PM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
Butterfly, brown with orange striped and white spots, sits on the end of an iron fence in late afternoon sunlight.
June 25, 2025 at 1:31 AM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
Little something using someone else's words and pictures based on someone else's drawings for today's workshop demo. (Sappho and Klimt, respectively.)
Scraps of paper with fragments of ink drawings on them are laid on top of another sheet of paper with expressive text on it. Some of the text reads "moon has set and the Pleiades. It is midnight."
June 22, 2025 at 4:18 PM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
Led a workshop at the Wende Museum, and a young participant gifted me their zine. These are my favorite pages... I traded them one of my comics I had with me. Long live zine culture. ❤️
Spread in a zine. On the left page is a cut up collage photo of a grumpy cat above the hand written text "don't mess." On the right page are dense, layered, horizontal lines drawn with different color markers. The silhouette of a tiny apple has been cut out.
June 21, 2025 at 7:07 AM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
... And a great book can come from anywhere
Cover of Chef Gusteau's cookbook "Anyone Can Cook," but the word "cook" has been replaced with "book."
June 18, 2025 at 7:32 AM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
Teaching two more workshops in Culver City this week: one on Friday at the Wende and one on Sunday at CRASH Space.
I'm demoing how to make an accordion fold book to folks at a long table covered with many folded pieces of paper.
June 18, 2025 at 7:27 AM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
I'm at #tcaf2025 on the second floor, table 75!
Me standing over my 3 foot table full of books at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.
June 7, 2025 at 6:30 PM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
Realized that a lot of my projects since I started making comics are about going on walks, including this latest one I'm slowly making my way through.

...man, I might be boring.
8 comics panels of a person's legs walking in a vague place in dappled light, all in blue color pencil.
May 19, 2025 at 6:05 PM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
Seattle Art Book Fair recap.
A great picture of me putting on my mask for the masked hour of the show, behind my table at the Seattle Art Book Fair. A tiny bird and a tiny moon and the edge of a tree at twilight. The crowds early on day one of the Seattle Art Book Fair.
May 13, 2025 at 1:02 PM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
Screenshot of text: Guillory aims to answer these questions by attempting something that has proved stubbornly elusive: to define close reading itself. Drawing from the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and his student André Leroi-Gourhan, Guillory argues that close reading is a “cultural technique” more than anything else, a “set of methodical actions that accomplish specific ends, that alter something in our environment or in ourselves.” His point in using such technical language is to situate close reading as a kind of reading and to make clear that reading is a long-standing practice of the human animal that belongs to the same category as “swimming, dancing, riding a bicycle, even tying shoelaces.”
May 12, 2025 at 7:58 PM
formerlybirds.bsky.social
Wut
A slice of a tree trunk suspended by an electrical wire over a street. Zoom in: The wire has run through the piece of suspended tree.
May 12, 2025 at 2:55 PM