Lavish books to get lost in
The latest coffee-table tomes all celebrate exuberance. Kicking things off is the story of the London seven-storey superstore Biba, with an introduction by its co-founder, Barbara Hulanicki. A little more weighty — literally and metaphorically — is the 24-tome edition of Freud’s works. Plus, there’s the latest visual extravaganza of chintz across the centuries and the transcendent photography of two pioneering female photographers.Welcome to Big Biba: Inside the Most Beautiful Store in the Worldby Steven Thomas and Alwyn W Turner, ACC Art Books, £22Founded by the fashion illustrator Barbara Hulanicki and her ad-executive husband Stephen Fitz-Simon, Biba began as a mail-order fashion business, its first success a pink gingham frock. The couple went on to reinvent fashion (couture styles at low prices) and shopping (dim lighting and loud music). The Biba revolution reached its peak in 1973 when it took over Derry & Toms department store on Kensington High Street in London, and this book details the creation of that seven-storey palace where everything was Biba branded. The aesthetic inspirations were golden-age cinema and art nouveau, the vibe playful naughtiness — in the lingerie department, bras and pants were strewn across a massive bed. Fresh fish was sold from a barge to a soundtrack of seagulls and the Rainbow Room restaurant served Biba red wine at 75p a half litre. In its heyday Biba was the second most popular tourist attraction in the capital after the Tower of London, but financial difficulties meant it had to close in 1975. Now all we have is this book of marabou-fringed nostalgia.Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream Inby Magdalene Keaney, NPG Books, £35Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman were pioneering female photographers, separated by time and social context and yet joined by the resonances between their works, as explored in this gorgeous, richly textured book published to accompany an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London this year. Cameron was born in 1815 and didn’t start taking photographs until she was 48; Woodman was born in 1958, printing her first photograph at 13 and taking her own life at 22. Both had short careers but both have become hugely influential. Their works engage with femininity, mythology, angelic beings, women in nature and narrative imagery. Cameron’s photographs are dreamily unfocused and unretouched — sometimes her fingerprints are visible — whereas Woodman rubbed the surfaces of her photos, wrote and drew on them. She said photographs can “offer images as an alternative to everyday life”, while Cameron wanted to capture a “transcendent beauty”. The book also contains essays and sketch books.AdvertisementRevised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund FreudOriginal translation by James Strachey. Revised, supplemented and edited by Mark Solms, Rowman & Littlefield, £1,500Tell me about your mother. Or perhaps your coffee table … Is it big enough to handle this magisterial offering: 24 books comprising all the psychological works by the inventor of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud? The Standard Edition was first published in English 60 years ago and contains all our old favourites, including “The Interpretation of Dreams” and “Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious”. This edition has been meticulously revised over three decades by the psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist Mark Solms, with the project taking three decades. It includes 56 new items, including a previously missing paper on the transference of neuroses, a letter to Einstein and a letter concerning homosexuality. There is also an extensive bibliography and revised indexing. The books are beautifully presented, with gold-stamped linen covers and midnight-blue endpapers. The Book of Printed Fabricsby Aziza Gril-Mariotte, Taschen, £150The Musée de L’Impression sur Étoffes in Mulhouse is dedicated to the history of printed fabrics, from their first arrival in Europe from India in the 16th century to the present day. There are more than 50,000 textile samples in the museum, only 900 of which have made it into this handsome double volume, a visual feast presented in a fancy slip jacket with a monkey motif, weighing in at a hefty 6.2kg. The first volume explores the popularity of cotton fabrics imported from India, with their colourful floral motifs, and the development of the techniques to create similar fabrics in Europe. The second volume kicks off with cashmere, which, when it was introduced, was so expensive that only the Empress Joséphine and other ladies of the court could afford to wear it (although soon enough paisley knockoffs were being produced). Learned essays are provided by a former director of the museum, and there are archive images of people wearing printed fabrics as well as luxurious interiors in which everything has been upholstered in chintz. But the real joy of this book is the pages and pages of gorgeous, delicate, flamboyantly decorated fabrics.