At the same time, photobook fairs have sprung up, among them Offprint, which runs alongside the annual Paris Photo fair, and is coming to London for the first time in May. The new space in the marketplace has been colonised by hundreds of small imprints, from a lone photographer offering 50 copies of a handmade book, to small presses dealing in editions of 500 to 1,000. For a tiny press, it can be the difference between sinking and staying afloat. For any publisher, the ability to sell even a percentage of your titles direct to the customer can save on discounts to distributors and retailers that can be around 50 per cent of the retail price.
Social media have also served as a free advertising network for selling books online. This is one end of an industry that has capitalised on the advances that digital technology has made to the design and production of visual publishing. The publishing side is part of a broader portfolio of activities that I do.” But the business model is quite different.
A special collectors’ edition is available for £400.Ĭeschel, who also lectures, writes, curates, runs workshops and speaks at festivals and fairs, says, “There are tons of small independent publishers now. A second edition last year, also sold out. The first edition of 1,000, at £45, sold out and its exchange value started to rise. It used a variety of coloured fabrics for its covers and reflected the multicultural nature of the area, but also memorialised it, recognising that gentrification might one day mean that the market would disappear. Its biggest success so far has been Lorenzo Vitturi’s 2013 book Dalston Anatomy, photographs of collages and sculptures that Vitturi made from the debris he found in the local market right under their noses. Two years later he started SPBH Editions, with designer Antonio de Luca, and set up a book club to support it (members receive three titles a year for £110). SPBH didn’t take money, but the network grew. As the books came in, he made a selection, scanned them and put them up online with an email address for the author. That prompted me to think that the books were out there. “There was a free symposium, and people were talking about these amazing publications,” he recalls, “and I thought, ‘Wow, most people in the industry don’t seem to see this material.’ So when I came back I did this call for submissions - really quite speculative. The fair, which hosts about 350 booksellers and attracts some 35,000 visitors, made a big impression. SPBH began as an experiment, after its Italian-born founder Bruno Ceschel, who worked as a photography editor and curator in London, visited the New York Art Book Fair in 2009. But since it set up in 2010, SPBH, like Donlon Books in nearby Broadway Market, has been at the heart of booming interest in photographic books - in buying them, selling them, making them, exchanging them, sharing news of them on social media, attending book-signings that promote them - on a scale that has defied all predictions of the death of the physical book in a digital future. Below its window is Ridley Road market, with stalls of African, Asian, Mediterranean and Caribbean fruit and veg, fabrics and clothing, spilling over the pavements.ĭespite the apparent chaos, this part of the city has become expensive, and the next generation is looking south of the Thames. Self Publish, Be Happy, the online platform for self-published artists’ books, is based in a rundown building in Dalston, an area that has, over the past decade, seen a generation of young Londoners move east.