From 1st June to 29th August, the store will open for a three month stint in the Front Room at St Martins Lane Hotel, housing Hill’s vast collection of one off and unique titles.
Heralded for her hand-picked selection of designer books and magazines across the field of fashion, design, photography, music and film, the store will exhibit an eclectic array of Hills’ favorites.
“I have always loved the shop space at St Martins Lane,” says Hill. “I used to visit when the hotel first opened and bought a lot from there, so it’s a perfect space for me to revisit with my very own temporary book store. St Martins Lane guests are our customers – international designers, architects, models, photographers, editors and creatives that buy my books for inspiration…it’s a great partnership.”
Previously only available in Colette and Dover St Market, visitors and hotel guests can unearth an assortment of fashion magazines sought out by Hill including Avant Mode, 19 and Ritz, inspirational craft books; Housebuilding for Children, The Canoe Book and Underground Interiors, experimental architecture of Archigram and Site, design by Alchimia and Memphis and classic photography of David Hamilton, Sarah Moon, James Wedge and Deborah Turbeville.
Open seven days a week, the store will be a must-visit destination for those at the forefront of these creative industries. Angela Hill’s IDEA Books Pop-up shop will be complimented with afternoon tea served daily from 2.30pm-5.30pm in Asia de Cuba.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
IDEA books – Pop up store – St Martins Lane Hotel
I popped into Angela Hill’s temporary bookshop next to the St Martins Hotel on St Martins Lane yesterday. Most impressed with her vintage collection of rare books and magazines on sale – loads of fashion, photography, design and so on – real obsessive collector stuff – some books priced at £10 rub spines with others priced at anything up to £5000.
I browsed through an early British 1970’s guide called How To Be A DJ (which recommended ‘any ABBA song’ as the ideal way to start your DJ set. Brilliant). A few books on hip hop culture (A first edition of David Toop’s Rap Attack from 1985) and some 70’s New York graffiti I’ve not seen before, but £125 a copy anyone? Plenty of Japanese design books (Droog, Archigram), some great photography (Gursky, Hamilton, Parr) and more more more.
Among the fashion books, the main subject matter of the store, there was a hard-to-find copy of the out of print Hussein Chalayan book (once £28, now £65) and also a copy of Maison Martin Mangiela’s Cream Magazine (which was £25 in my shop last year, now £65 here – oops!).
To be fair, most of the books are priced at the going rate, and on balance, I spotted a couple of items that are actually more expensive on Amazon, but it’s always a bit surprising to see books you casually bought and sold regularly only a few months (or years, admittedly) ago, increase in street value by three or four times. I say ’street value’ intentionally, for Angela Hill is clearly an art-fashion-book drug dealer, with visual junkie fashionistas circling the shelves, twitching and trembling at the sight of a fading copy of Ritz magazine.
The shop is of course a taste of nirvana for me, as someone who has an irrepressible fetish for the book-as-art-object. Vitsoe provide the shelving, those lovely Dieter Ram’s 606’s again. Perfect.
I browsed through an early British 1970’s guide called How To Be A DJ (which recommended ‘any ABBA song’ as the ideal way to start your DJ set. Brilliant). A few books on hip hop culture (A first edition of David Toop’s Rap Attack from 1985) and some 70’s New York graffiti I’ve not seen before, but £125 a copy anyone? Plenty of Japanese design books (Droog, Archigram), some great photography (Gursky, Hamilton, Parr) and more more more.
Among the fashion books, the main subject matter of the store, there was a hard-to-find copy of the out of print Hussein Chalayan book (once £28, now £65) and also a copy of Maison Martin Mangiela’s Cream Magazine (which was £25 in my shop last year, now £65 here – oops!).
To be fair, most of the books are priced at the going rate, and on balance, I spotted a couple of items that are actually more expensive on Amazon, but it’s always a bit surprising to see books you casually bought and sold regularly only a few months (or years, admittedly) ago, increase in street value by three or four times. I say ’street value’ intentionally, for Angela Hill is clearly an art-fashion-book drug dealer, with visual junkie fashionistas circling the shelves, twitching and trembling at the sight of a fading copy of Ritz magazine.
The shop is of course a taste of nirvana for me, as someone who has an irrepressible fetish for the book-as-art-object. Vitsoe provide the shelving, those lovely Dieter Ram’s 606’s again. Perfect.
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