Tonight I had some business with Nippon Camera and the small room where the meeting with an editor took place had three walls with bookshelves full of Japanese photobooks. There are some treasures in there if you look hard enough.
One to bring home from a bookshop would be Nagano Shigeichi’s book 1960.
In a city full of bookstores, coming across local shops isn’t uncommon to say the least. Most are often jammed floor to ceiling with 1980s manga, old movie pamphlets, cheap novels and a surplus of Famous Classic Japanese Painter (or Tea Cup Photo) collections. The latter are tall and thick books in lavish slip covers (some kept tight with ribbons latched with little plastic fake ivory hooks) covered in expensive cloth sometimes found in sets of two or more volumes. Despite a list price (on the inside cover) of sometimes over 20,000 yen per book the sets are sold for pennies on the dollar- and since they’ve no doubt only ever been looked at twice each book truly is ebay SUPER MINT A+++++ but this is offset by the fact that even at 200 yen no one seems to buy them.
The photo book section in these kinds of shops that isn’t used porn (1/3 of the store) is usually limited to bulky slipcased collections of Landscapes or Nudes circa 1987 to 1994 or has been Rock Star / Celebrity / Bikini Model fan books.
With Secondhand Books Horo, this isn’t the case at all. Horo’s photo book section isn’t overwhelming but the quality is great.
The Araki selection was of good taste and they had a bit more internationally published photo books than the average shop. Their entire art section continues around to the right off the frame of the picture above with another nearby shelf for Travel and Magnum photography collections. I thought their prices were a little better than the shops (Bohemian’s Guild & Genkido) in Jimbocho. Finding the Steidl published Hiromix collection for 2500 yen was not a bad deal indeed.
The shop is located on Shinobazu Dori about a 5min walk after taking a left (north) from the #2 exit of Sendagi station on the Chiyoda line. map here
One of my favorite photo books encountered this year:
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