Trick-or-treating at Climax Books’ New York expansion reveals a vault of goth obscurities and witchy reads.
Image courtesy of Whitney Mallett.
I showed up at the new Climax Books thinking they could help me choose a spooky book, tis the season. Darcy Haylor, the manager of the Lower East Side outpost, an austere haven of minimalist design, right away started pulling goth treasures from the brushed stainless steel shelves. I flipped open Sue de Beer’s Hans Und Grete (American Academy of Berlin, 2002) right to a pic of Alissa Bennett looking perfectly butch and moody and sent it to her.
Image courtesy of Whitney Mallett.
Image courtesy of Whitney Mallett.
“Six hundred years ago today,” Bennett replied. “Those texts are good. I wrote them based on the characters in my teen novel.” The book collects Bennett’s writing together with poems by Dennis Cooper (who I just saw read the night before at the Poetry Project) and de Beer’s disaffected teen imagery. It was a book I didn’t know I needed before I saw it, but then I bought it.
Image courtesy of Whitney Mallett.
Founded by Isabella Burley as an online shop in 2020 (the first brick-and-mortar location came in London last year), Climax stocks a curated mix of old and new titles, a lot of their inventory rare deep cuts, of which they only have a single copy. I had so much fucking fun browsing everything Haylor pulled: Tricker’s Cabin: The Oral and Visual History of Online Ceramics (A24, 2024); the 1991 “Angry Women” issue of Research Magazine (including Wanda Coleman, Avital Ronell, Kathy Acker, Diamanda Galás, etc.); Lydia Lunch, Adulterers Anonymous (Last Gasp of San Francisco, 1996), Jonny Trunk, Dressing for Pleasure: The Best of AtomAge 1972–1980 (Fuel, 2010); Bibliomancers, Spellbound: Exploring Witchcraft and the Occult through Vintage Paperbacks (Atomic, 2024), and Thierry Secretan, Going Into Darkness: Fantastic Coffins from Africa (Thames & Hudson, 1999).
Image courtesy of Whitney Mallett.
Haylor says she loves when people give her an assignment: “They’ll say they’re interested in a certain subject matter, or they need a gift.” For really rare stuff, she even brings out the gloves. Kinky shit. Oh, and there’s also a window seat upholstered in latex, a Cronenbergian accent that makes the whole impeccably designed boutique (credit Kat Milne) delicious.
Location is everything—especially for LA renaissance man Harley Wertheimer. Be it the new setting of his contemporary art gallery or his revitalized Hollywood café a stone’s throw away, he sees spaces not for what they are but for what they could be.
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Traditionally served on Shrove Tuesday, this sweet, cardamom-flavored pastry never goes out of season for photographer Jukka Ovaskainen.
