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Martin Usborne has set up an independent publishing house specialising in collectable books about east London.
Usborne—son of Usborne Children’s Books founder and c.e.o. Peter—and his wife Ann Waldvogel set up Hoxton Mini Press on Kickstarter to raise funds for their two launch books—East London Photo Stories and Illustrated East London—and raised more than three times their goal of £5,000.
The project began when Usborne, a photographer, met octogenarian East Londoner Joseph Markovitch and started taking portraits of him in his neighbourhood. “We struck up an unusual friendship,” Usborne said, “and probably because of my being brought up with my dad’s company I had a natural fascination for books, and I’ve always loved photography in books, so thought I’d make a book of his story.”
Hoxton Mini Press’ titles come in two formats: a £12.95 hardback and a signed, numbered collector’s edition that comes in a gift box for £45. Usborne and Waldvogel plan to publish at least four titles a year based around east London.
In spring they publish Shoreditch Wildlife by Dougie Wallace, “about the crazy street life of Shoreditch at night”, and Swimmers by Madeleine Waller, a book of portraits of people swimming in the East London Lido.
The east London focus is something that Usborne says enables Hoxton Mini Press to be “a medium-sized fish in a small pond as opposed to being lost in the ocean. I can see there being 50 books about east London, it’s such a rich and diverse area with so much talent to work with.
“There is a vague idea that if we can make local publishing work for east London then maybe we can make it work for other places in the world—in Manhattan or Paris.”
Usborne said that although Waterstones, Tate and Daunt are stocking Hoxton Mini Press, design shops and gift shops have generally shown more interest than high street and chain bookshops. “We’re trying to do something that bridges both the mainstream book market and the slightly more high-end photography market, to see if we can have a nod to both.”
Usborne added that his father supported their decision to launch the publisher: “We had a conversation where he was saying it would be much stronger to do a brand about Hackney, or east London, than it would be to do a brand about London.
“We’re looking at these very much as objects, which is why we’re doing the boxes. We care an awful lot about design. We want this notion of collectability to be at the forefront of everything we do. We are really passionate about making something beautiful, so at the moment we’ll make the best products we can out of it and see if we can make it work,” Usborne said.