Exploring the Pleasures of Print With Climax Books
Fresh off her New York store opening, founder Isabella Burley talks taking a tongue-in-cheek approach to rare book dealing.
“Climax has come to embody a point of view and an attitude,” says Isabella Burley, the founder of Climax Books. She’s perched on a bench in the New York location of her rare book dealership, where Climax’s commitment to attitude rings clear: the windows are covered in a hot pink wrap and inside, a mirrored wall is plastered with a life-size decal of a green lady in fishnets. True to its name, Climax is a distributor of rare-to-find vintage erotica (in book, magazine and DVD and VHS form) but also contains a sprawling collection of titles across art, fashion and theory.
A quick scroll through the online arm of the dealership showcases an impressive array of first edition titles across decades, ranging from Yayoi Kusama’s 1969 periodical An Orgy of Nudity, Love, Sex & Beauty to Wolfgang Tillmans’ political photobook, 1999’s Soldiers: The Nineties. Elsewhere are more contemporary (albeit often still provocative) titles from Precious Okoyomon, Mindy Seu and Somaya Critchlow. The majority of Climax’s offerings are sourced from New York, London and Tokyo, the three cities between which Burley splits her time.
“We’re looking at important bodies of work from the past that have maybe been under-recognized or forgotten,” Burley says of Climax’s approach. “It’s about recontextualizing those works for a new audience, but also including contemporary artists we really believe in.”
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While Climax was launched online in 2020, Burley has long been regarded as one of the premier tastemakers in contemporary publishing. She was an avid collector of magazines as a teenager in Southeast London. Specifically, she became interested in the fashion world while working at Dover Street Market and freelance writing on the side. In 2013, Burley was tapped to serve as Dazed’s fashion features editor, and two years later, at 24 years old, she was named editor-in-chief of the magazine. Burley held the role until 2021 and was later appointed Chief Marketing Officer of Acne Studios. Although she leans away from defining Climax as a “pandemic project,” she says that period allowed her the space to revisit all the books she had accrued over the years.
Climax was an online-only business that shipped books out of Burley’s home until 2023, when it was invited to take over the ground floor of London’s Sadie Coles Gallery in partnership with “Hardcore,” an exhibition presenting works centered on sexual power dynamics. The three-month pop-up was a success, pointing to the potential for a brick-and-mortar presence. That fall, Climax opened a London storefront that doubles as the dealership’s office.
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Expanding to another city just a year after launching the first store is no small feat, but “for me, it always had to be New York,” Burley says. “The book culture in New York, particularly the East Village, is unparalleled.”
While the London outpost has a more cozy feel, the minimalist New York location is a statement, a true capital-F flagship. Aesthetically, it’s edgier and sexier, with chrome bookcases that hold selects from the store’s archives. In one corner of the shop is a rack that holds latex shopping bags and pieces from its collection with the London-hailing Chopova Lowena. For its collaboration, designers Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena designed zip-up hoodies with patches made out of vintage sweetheart napkins, each of which shows a graphic of a girl ripping pages out of her diary. The collection also contains graphic tees and a mesh underwear set printed with a custom Climax-Chopova Lowena logo.
“Climax is such an open space for people to work with us and create things they’ve never done before,” Burley says. “Chopova Lowena, for instance, had never made underwear before.”
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In October 2023, Climax also published its inaugural title: Pissing Women by Sophy Rickett. Edited by Burley and designed by Christopher Lawson, who also helmed Climax’s visual design, the book comprises 26 black-and-white photographs from Rickett’s 1995 series, showcasing women dressed in office wear peeing on the streets of London.
For Burley, building out Climax’s publishing program is a natural return to form. Similar to her perspective on the dealership’s curation as a whole, the Pissing Women book was compiled to reintroduce archival work to a new generation while developing an understanding behind the making of the series through previously unseen outtakes.
“The way that we’ve approached publishing at Climax is almost having these two very separate worlds that live perfectly together,” Burley says of her business’s work in both the archival and contemporary worlds. Climax returned with its second title earlier this month, a 550-page tome surveying ten years of images produced between 2014 and 2024 by artist Martine Syms, whose work examines themes of identity, gender and Black culture. The occasion was commemorated with a book signing event at the New York store.
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As for Climax’s future plans, Burley says she’s open to collaborations with people from all industries: art, fashion, publishing and beyond. Nothing is off the table, though whatever form the next project takes, it’ll espouse the Climax POV: intellectual, playful and provocative.
“Books have always been the foundation of Climax,” Burley says. “But it’s developed into something so much bigger, and that feels really exciting to work on.”
