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Who is Press?
Scrolling through Press is the closest you’ll get on Instagram to strolling through a vintage bookshop. Its grid is lined with obscure books primarily from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, which span art, fashion, design, photography and craft. There’s party sushi-making, heroic fantasy illustrations, chakra exploration, Beatrix Potter knitting guides, and special-edition publications from the likes of Lancôme and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Founded by partners Paulina Nassar and Nick Sarno, Press originated as a bricks-and-mortar bookshop in San Francisco in 2010, before morphing into the Instagram page. “When we had the store, I found that the same people would come in and get all the books,” says Nassar. “They had means, they had access. With the account, it’s different. It’s really important to me for things to be democratic and for people to have access to cool things and cool images, and for it not to be expensive.”
Nassar and Sarno trawl through used book stores and library sales across the country and post a handful of finds on an irregular basis each week. All titles are available for purchase via their website, often costing no more than $30.
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Why should you follow?
Frustratingly for many of its 103k followers, each book usually sells out within a couple of minutes of being posted, which is why Press’s focus is less about selling and more about giving forgotten books a second life.
“What we are trying to do with this feed is to create a library of images rather than having it be a marketplace only,” says Nassar. “I think Press is a pleasant place to be on the internet. I hope it makes people feel cosy and inspired, and leaves them wanting to seek out more information about a particular book or author or artist.”
Press is rooted in San Francisco’s “radical, anti-establishment” heritage, making it particularly suited to lovers of counter culture. It features numerous Californian craft books from the ’60s and ’70s, such as the much-loved Native Funk & Flash: An Emerging Folk Art (1974).
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What Instagram doesn’t tell you…
While Sarno has a publishing background, Nassar became entranced by vintage books during the noughties while working at Resurrection, a vintage clothing store in New York.
“I used to think of rare books as a first-edition Dickens or an old book that’s dusty with a gold inlay on the spine. But what Resurrection did was to take these beautiful art books and lay them out as collectable art objects.”
Nassar recoils from the term “coffee-table book”, however. “I sort of chafe at that expression,” he says. “It’s this idea of an expensive, clunky book that just sits on the table without being read. Most of our books aren’t like that: they’re weird books intended to make you laugh, or books that are important to get out there.”
Madeleine Pollard is a Berlin-based journalist specialising in culture and current affairs
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