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.