Country of origin UK Owner(s) www.caferoyalbooks.com Founded 2005 | Fiction genres drawing Official website caferoyalbooks.com Founder Craig Atkinson | |
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Nonfiction topics Documentary photography | ||
Café Royal Books is a small independent publisher of photography photobooks or zines, and sometimes drawing, solely run by Craig Atkinson and based in Southport, England. Café Royal Books produces small-run publications predominantly documenting social, historical and architectural change, often in Britain, using both new work and photographs from archives. It has been operating since 2005. Their publications are held in public collections including Tate, Britain; National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Canada; and the British Library. By mid 2014 Café Royal had published about 200 books and zines.
Contents
Martin Parr has described Café Royal Books as "a great archive of much forgotten documentary photography" and Daniel Meadows has said "Craig Atkinson [ . . . ] has invented a publishing model for creating a truly exciting new history of documentary photography in Britain."
Details
Atkinson, based in Southport and a lecturer in the School of Art, Design and Performance at the University of Central Lancashire, founded Café Royal Books in 2005. The titles are published frequently, typically one per week in 2014, always in short runs typically of 150 copies. They are sold direct and through bookshops in the UK, Europe, USA, Australia, Japan, Canada and Switzerland. All their books have a consistent print quality, paper and layout; the colophon is on the front allowing it to be easily read on bookshop shelves, they are laid out to a grid system, usually 28 pages in length, slightly under A5 size, originally but no longer hand numbered, predominantly black & white and affordably printed.
Café Royal Books produce publications predominantly documenting social, historical and architectural change, using both new work and photographs from archives. Writing in Artist's Book Yearbook: 2014-2015 (Impact Press, 2013) Atkinson said emphasis "is given to work that encourages new ways of thinking about existing material or language which demonstrates the importance of using, documenting, collecting and observing a particular process or thing." For example in 2013 Café Royal began publishing a series of books based loosely on Britain and Britishness by British photographers.
The first six publications were collaborative group books. Since then most have included the work of an individual photographer or artist. Café Royal Books specialises in collaborating with a photographer. It has published work by John Bulmer, David Carol, John Claridge, John Deakin, Peter Dench, Henrik Drescher, Ken Grant, Laurent Impeduglia, David Levenson, Daniel Meadows, Jim Mortram, Martin Parr, Simon Roberts, Victor Sloan, Brian David Stevens, Homer Sykes, Ed Templeton, Arthur Tress, and Patrick Ward among others. Café Royal has worked with some photographers to produce numerous different books of their work. Many of the books are of Atkinson's own work.
In 2014 Café Royal Books produced one publication per week.
Collections
Various Café Royal publications are held in public collections (museums and galleries) including:
Café Royal Projects
Café Royal Projects are occasional projects that use gallery type spaces for a purpose other than an exhibition. In 2010 the Café Royal Temporary Library invited artists to submit books and editions. The gallery space was presented as a reading room for the public to use, with 800 titles. In 2012 the International Drawing Project exhibited film, drawing, and publications from eighty artists over three weeks. Ten catalogues were published to document the event and the artists. In 2013 an exhibition and reading room featured essays from academics with backgrounds in photography, artists' books and communication design.