Turning Ten and Staying Tender: The Everlasting Charm of Tenderbooks

‘It’s really natural to me that people make things like this all over the world', Tamsin Clark, owner & director of Tenderbooks, tells me, not referring to anything in particular but rather anything of particular note. Her use of ‘this’ acts as an extension of the store’s offerings, subsequently speaking to the impossibly infinite collection of zines and rare art books that populate the 48 square metre space.

Not just a refuge for Clark’s peculiar printing passions and obsessions, Tenderbooks is a home for anyone wanting and willing to tamper with the wonderful ways of A) creating (such as when Susanna Davies-Crook of Jouissance Parfums hosted an erotic writing workshop). B) making (the store once held a masterclass with artist David Horvitz who invited the public to write their own poems using nothing but pre-selected stamps), C) thinking (if you haven’t attended at least one of the hundreds of book signings and readings Tenderbooks organise weekly where have you been) and doing. When the former three come together, they stir up a creative concoction that's nearly as rare as the physical objects stocked inside.

Nestled halfway down the literary-approved back alley Cecil Court and sandwiched between Leicester Square and Charing Cross stations (past frequenters include T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene and even George Orwell), Tenderbooks is indeed a haunt all self-professed book lovers have - or at least should - pay a visit to once in their lifetime. Expect to find an overflowing pile of idiosyncrasies, all of which dabble in the delight and possibility of words despite not necessarily conforming to the traditional methods in which we choose to bind them.

There are books, yes, but that’s not all. Boxes and pamphlets and jumpers and fabrics can all be found here too, as can posters and tokens and perfumes and zines so delicately sewn or stapled together, you wouldn't believe them to be 'handmade' zines at all; all of which ‘can be considered a form of publication, in their own way’ Clark proposes, hinting that books don’t always have to look like books to be called books. As for the most interesting? The only requirement Clark has for accepting publications is that they’re totally other, my words, not hers. ‘Things that you just wouldn’t find’, she clarifies before trailing off, ‘things that don’t necessarily represent well online, things that you have to be touched to be understood’. With that in mind, it would be wholly unfair to compare or contrast the objects that have found a home in Tenderbooks but I'll do it anyway for the sake of professing one of Clark’s most cherished items (and what would be mine too, if I could get my hands on one) - Till Death Do Us Part.

Not the first time this specific palm-sized object has piqued my interest, Till Death Do Us Part is a shining example of how many of the items stocked at Tenderbooks often combat the traditional in favour of the radical, in this case being a zine doubling up as a packet of cigarettes (don’t get too excited though, no cigarettes were smoked in the making of this book). Fittingly, the design goes hand in hand with the work’s subject matter which documents the culture and symbolism of cigarettes in and amongst Chinese weddings, where, as Clark informs me ‘it’s customary for the bride to light everyone’s cigarettes, there’s even an image of a baby smoking which is really extraordinary’.

The book itself is published by the China-based Jiazazhi press, 'and it’s put together by a curator called Thomas Sauvin, who has a project titled Beijing Silvermine, a literal silvermine compiling over one million negatives’, Clark reveals. As for the genuine cigarette packet encasing the miniature wooden book, ‘it’s real and it’s by the Chinese cigarette brand Double Happiness’, Clark tells - a popular choice for those looking to engage in this luck lore, I imagine, and also a detail I wasn’t aware of when I had first encountered this publication some years before when lecturing on a zine project for a university in London. I can’t recall the specifics, but I do remember being enamoured by its reported tween size (this is the first time I’ve seen the publication in the flesh - a joy I never thought I'd be lucky enough to experience for myself) and its refusal to sway from one very niche, very precise subject. ‘You have all these kinds of smoking games documented as well, it’s such a rare, beautiful capsule of a life’, Clark notes. ‘This is my only copy, and it’s quite hard to get hold of as the publishing situation in China is tricky right now. Hopefully, there’s more on the way, but it’s one that is special to me because the form and the content just come together so beautifully. It really is one of a kind’.

Not only is Till Death Do Us Part a ‘one of a kind’ piece hot off the clandestine press, it’s also a rarity in and amongst Tenderbooks’ equally rare offerings, all of which have been curated with as much thought and intent as the bookshop’s weekly programme of events, where the old and the new coalesce, just as they do within the area; Tenderbooks is the only contemporary book store lining Cecil Court’s cobblestone street. Its fashion, art and performance-influenced window displays spend day and night staring out at the store’s neighbouring antiquarian bookshop fronts, some of which have stood proudly for over half a century. ‘I think it’s nice how the new books talk to the old books as well’, Clark notes.

‘It’s unusual to have the two side by side, so that’s definitely our USP’. Clark isn’t just talking about Tenderbooks’ neighbours, but also the spectacularly vast range of books stocked under the same Tender roof. ‘It’s really nice as well because we get younger people who are starting to build their own collections which is quite touching,’ she pauses, before adding: ‘Not everyone is going to come in and drop £2,000 on a book…’ but, as Clark knows, that doesn’t matter. The concept of Tenderbooks means particular publications that are normally harder to find or get hold of in a research context at a library are much more accessible here. ‘It’s definitely a different point of access for different people, allowing them to stumble across things in a way that they may not usually, but are still happy to look at. And I'm always happy to show people, so there’s that, too’.

The art of ‘stumbling across things’ is one Clark has perfected over her ten-year tenure at Tenderbooks, owing to the success of a business model that relies on few things other than happenstance (I must stipulate: hard work, curiosity, and a willfully-backed fervour for the avant-garde come a close second). The point here being that although Tenderbooks is an excellently curated store, it’s dependent on a model of selling purposefully devoid of curation. There’s no ‘Dance’, ‘Art History’ and ‘Fashion’ placards lining its top shelves, and that’s deliberate; Clark would rather turn your attention to life’s chance encounters, especially when embraced by the world of books.

‘I love the idea that on just one shelf, you can have different art forms and disciplines by different artists across different generations, and it all sits together’, Clark professes. ‘It might not be what you thought you were going to find, but I take a lot of joy in surprises and I want Tenderbooks customers to expect a surprise every time they come in, even if their reason for stepping through our front door is for a specific book they know we stock’. Lost for comparisons apart from admitting to Clark that her business model shares more with a modern day contemporary art gallery than it does a bookshop, as eyerolling as that analogy is, I admit, she saves me from embarrassing myself further. 'I guess it’s always been that way with a record store - like you can do that type of thing and people love it still. They used to call it “dipping for records”’. As it turns out, Clark’s love for happy accidents stems from how she ended up at Tenderbooks in the first place. ‘I grew up in an environment where everyone was making books, my parents especially’, she reflects. ‘I grew up in that world but also in art, I worked in galleries before this as well but I've always been interested in the design and form of books and I've done a bit of that myself - I have a book making practice, and I also studied English and Philosophy so it was lots of these strands coming together. It kind of happened by accident, but when it did, I thought “yeah, this makes sense”.’

Another happy accident comes in the form of George Hashiguchi’s Couple, not in the way it's placed but in its contents - pages that were printed before Tenderbooks’ time. ‘It’s a very simple concept in that he just photographed lots of different couples throughout Japan between the years 1990 to 1992', Clark reveals while flicking through. ‘There’s a little bit of text underneath each naming each person’s name and occupation as well.’ Depending on your algorithm, this idea may or may not ring a bell of similarity, but if you’re on Instagram, you would know a simple social media scroll often ends in a discovery of pages and pages of accounts similar to @meetcutesnyc (who has 3M subscribers at the time of writing). Varying in form - some stop people on the street and ask them for one piece of life advise, others stop people and ask them to show them their apartments, some are outfit-focused and others centre on couples and their stories - it’s truly a whole mix to wade through, a social media phenomena in its own right; each bottom takeaway highlighting our individualist society. That said, Hashiguchi’s Couple brings home the truth - this isn’t new, nor something specific to our social media-reliant world. ‘It proves that we’ve been interested in documenting people on the street long before we could flood people’s feeds with it’, Clark observes. ‘It’s actually, for the time, you know, it’s pretty groundbreaking. He photographed interracial couples and queer couples. It’s very romantic and a very gentle look at coupledom. Also, part of it was that they were allowed to choose how they wanted to be presented, so it’s interesting how they’re sat or what situation they’re in, a slice of it belonging in street style history too where we’re allowed a peek into an extension of their world'.

Aside from Couple and Till Death Do Us Part, both of which are classified as photobooks, there’s a plethora of others to feast your eyes on. If you’re a fashion student, just knowing Tenderbooks stocks Comme des Garcons 1975-1982 - ‘an amazing piece of production considering it was never made commercially available’, Clark imparts - should be music to your ears (it was exclusively printed for clients at the time, meaning it was never intended to be sold), as should Clark’s circulation of Talking to Myself by Yohji Yamamoto: ‘two beautiful volumes dressed in linen that presents as ‘a scrapbook of ideas. The first book is filled with sketches, stills, photographs and anecdotes, and the second book gives a rundown of the collections from 1981-2002’, Clark says. It gets better. ‘There’s a lot of Nick Knight in here, as there is Peter Lindbergh, Craig McDean, Sarah Moon and Paolo Roversi. Another thing is that the level of care of Japanese books is always astounding to me, I'm amazed every time.’

The variation may be astounding, but there are multiple threads that connect the dots between each Tenderbooks publication. The thickest strand is how each and every one is a tender document, not only of creativity, but also of history. Imagination may exist in varying degrees, but for those who have it, rest assured Tenderbooks is there to champion you, definitively and unconditionally.