girls blue © Hiromix. Courtesy of Climax Books
They makeup a handful of stores that have shot to renown for sourcing rare printed matter – here, they share their favourite photo books
In a basement tucket away in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, native New Yorker Bill Hall tours around the city’s most fashionable and resourceful – ranging from magazine editors, fashion designers, creative directors and photographers. He’s turned his home into High Valley Books, a bookstore of rare and vintage books and magazines. His living room is lined with antique shelves balancing huge hardbacks and an impressive photobook section – downstairs, the dusty basement’s rows of bookshelves are lit by a few rusty lamps, illuminating the spines of hundreds of vintage copies of The Face, i-D, Vogue, The New Yorker and the like.
Hall opened High Valley in 1999, “the first large library I purchased,” he tells me, “was the collection of a fashion designer moving back to the UK. He had extraordinary photography books and magazines.” After a friend designed his first website, he soon had people coming out to Brooklyn to see what Hall had in stock.
The proprietor enjoys photographing the people who turn up, posting images of them with their latest purchases on his Instagram: on a recent visit, for example, Hall posted a photo of me with a rare edition of Freya Stark’s Riding to the Tigris. Visits are made by appointment only, keeping this gem fairly safe from being overrun by flocks of shoppers, though the store is hardly a well-kept secret.
“Being good at finding the best (and previously overlooked) books of the last fifty years or so has given us a step up into publishing”
– David Owen and Angela Hill
“I like to think people come here to find what they didn’t know they were looking for,” Hall tells me. He didn’t quite expect for High Valley to gain the allure it’s achieved today – running the shop solo, he has his hands completely full, but still says that “It has been very positive to get validation from diverse sources.” Now, one difficulty remains: “finding room to cram all the treasures in.”
Over in London, IDEA has become an institution of bookselling and rare print material for decades. After couple Angela Hill and David Owen had sourced the books for the once iconic concept store Colette in Paris. From there, they picked up Dover Street Market which remains their main distributor – in London, New York, Tokyo and LA.
After the birth of Instagram, IDEA “exploded,” the couple reminisces. They use the page to catalogue images from their books, which span mostly ‘90s high fashion, popular and subculture, and photography. Their archive includes David Lee’s The Cocaine Consumer’s Handbook and the James Is A Girl cover issue of The New York Times Magazine, 1996, written by Jennifer Egan and photographed by Nan Goldin, “probably the single most important ‘90s fashion and photography reference,” says IDEA’s archive page. And their current collection boasts the Lost in Translation photobook, a signed copy of Soldiers by Wolfgang Tillmans, and several vintage Jurgen Teller editorial monographs (of course).
Despite the fact the store is marked simply by a blank door on the street and a small bell, their low-key exterior is no reflection of both the swanky store inside of their Soho building, and the reputation they’ve reached as the go-to vintage book supplier in Europe.
“IDEA happens to be an acronym for our family,” Hill and Owen tell me. “Iris, David, Edith and Angela. It was Iris that thought of it aged around 10 years old.” They took the same retro, on-the-nose approach to naming their sales arm of the collection: SUPERBOOKS. “It is embarrassing now but we haven’t ever thought of a better one word descriptor. These are the books that have a huge reach and impact with a creative audience.”
“Being good at finding the best (and previously overlooked) books of the last fifty years or so has given us a step up into publishing,” the couple says. IDEA now publishes its own books, “Some of the people we sell books to become the artists we publish.”
Interestingly, Hill and Owen say that they are “not so desperately devoted to books as such,” rather, for the period they respond to most – the ‘70s to 2000s – was books were the best way to record visual creativity. “As a result, to want to find and share that creativity (and make a living), you almost have to become a book dealer.”
The industry has changed and book dealing is not what it was before the internet. “You used to be able to go to a second hand bookshop and find wonderful things. Then the internet came along and everyone listed their books and everyone else bought them. If someone wanted all the classic Irving Penn or Richard Avedon, they could just click and buy them,” say the duo. “The result of that mass purchasing is that, on a daily basis, the only books in a bookshop that are not being packed up to be shipped, are either titles no one wants or great books that are wildly overpriced.”
In a wildly too-convenient technological era, decades-old dealers such as IDEA and High Valley are a breath of fresh air and perhaps a hark back to the ‘good ‘ol days’ of print. It’s a feeling many creative youth crave today, which is why Isabella Burley’s Climax Books finds itself at home in Soho, London – it has quickly become a true favourite among the fashion industry’s bright minds and rising photographers.
Burley, the former editor-in-chief of Dazed magazine and current chief marketing officer for Acne Studios, began ideating Climax during the pandemic, and the London store opened in 2020. In September 2024, she opened the New York storefront. “I’ve always been obsessively collecting books and ephemera, since I was a teenager,” Burley tells me. “I knew I wanted to bring together my background in fashion and publishing to present a new vision of a bookstore.”
Burley certainly represents an unorthodox, sometimes sexy approach to selling books on sub and counterculture, providing latex shopping bags and hosting collaborations in-store with designers from Chopova Lowena to Marc Jacobs Heaven.
The rare books Burley sources are “confrontational, tasteful and of cultural significance,” a fitting description also for Climax’s recent publications: Pissing Women by Sophy Rickett, for example, is an archival project featuring photographs of women dressed in officewear urinating on the streets of London. Its next publication will be Queer Dyke Cruising, an ‘80s archive by Del LaGrace Volcano shot at Hampstead Heath, London.
Burley feels that sourcing books is “never difficult,” but it is “an exciting challenge! I love the hunt,” she says.
Below, IDEA, Climax Books and High Valley Books share their favourite photo books from their collections:
IDEA
Ask The Angels by Donna Santisi – “Published in 1978. It is practically handmade – surely assembled by hand. It is the cheap plastic binding that actually cuts through the pictures that makes it work wonders for us.”
Lady’s – “There are a lot of Japanese motorcycle gang books and all of them focus on the male members of the Bōsōzoku. Not this one. And the women are even more fierce!”
Skinhead Girl by Alan Mead – “All the photographs were submitted by skinhead girls. And they did this way before camera phones, hence the cover being entirely composed of photobooth pictures.”
High School USA by Jim Richardson – “Jim Richardson’s photographic survey of American high schools somehow avoided being labelled or lauded as a photobook. But it is incredibly good so we are championing it.”
The Bangy Book by Vincent Alan W – “This one has a great story. The photographer Vincent Alan W was clearly obsessed with the street fashions of these Bangy boys but (we are only guessing) could only find a publisher in Vis A Vis who seem to have exclusively produced gay erotica. So seemingly in a compromise, the photographer returned to New York, booked a studio, and in every 10 or so photos, his subjects drop their shorts. A very surprising fashion book!”
Cathy by John Carder Bush – “John Carder Bush’s book of photographs of his sister, Kate Bush. The pictures capture her in girlhood to, possibly, early teens. These are quite remarkably prescient pictures.
High Valley Books
Animals in Motion by Eadweard Muybridge
“An interesting, historical work by a complicated character.”
“Relentlessly cheerful.”
Souvenirs Improbables by Sarah Moon
“Mysterious, moody.”
Executive Model by Ron Jude
“Fashion and art combined”
The New Color Photography by Sally Eauclair
“The beauty of film colour, as explored by many photographers before digital.”
Climax Books
Photographs by J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere
