As we head into autumn, what’s more pleasurable than hoarding a load of photo books to leaf through as the nights draw in? With that in mind, we have put together a list of London’s specialist art and culture bookshops. Here’s an intro to their beautifully curated collections of new finds, independently published books and zines, cult classics and rare gems.
With just about 600 followers on Instagram, Rut Books is the most unassuming on this list, appearing on Saturdays at Jake’s in Bethnal Green. Founded in 2025 by art directors Marta Úrbez and Stanley Everest, their stocked titles include the likes of Collier Schorr, Robert Mapplethorpe, Kishin Shinoyama, Richard Prince and Ari Marcopoulos. Their first Instagram post, made in April 2025, gives an elusive insight into their ethos: “Rut is a bookshop in seasons.”
If we haven’t been to the shop, what should we expect?
Rut Books: A small, constant rotation on four shelves at Jake’s every Saturday.
What are your specialities or key areas of interest?
Rut Books: Out-of-print photography, fashion and style, art and some obscura. Some books we lust over and other finds are left to chance.
Which three words best describe your ethos?
Rut Books: Half and half!
What would be your dream book to get your hands on?
Rut Books: Seth Siegelaub’s The Xerox Book.
Which five books would you have on your syllabus for aspiring artists and photographers?
Rut Books: August Sander, People of the 21st Century; Artist, Work, Lisson; Kishin Shinoyama, Icons; William Carlos Williams, A Recognisable Image. And any book you come across that you are interested in – that’s the right book for you!
Visit Rut Books every Saturday at Jake’s, 63 Vyner Street, E2 9DQ.
Previously online, this Glasgow-based bookshop can now be found in the designated project space of East London’s cryptic vintage clothes dealer, Twos. Their podcast features exclusive conversations with artists including Jasmine Gregory, Julien Ceccaldi and Alan Michael, poet Stuart McKenzie, writer Charlie Fox and filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. Knot offers distinctive books by the likes of Yu Nishimura, Susan Cianciolo and Nancy Grossman, as well as esoteric posters, magazines, movie pamphlets and more.
For anyone who hasn’t been to the shop, what should they expect?
Knot: A Point of View.
What are your specialities/key areas of interest?
Knot: Images.
Which three words best describe your ethos?
Knot: Stubborn, careful, thoughtful.
What would be your dream book to get your hands on?
Knot: There is no one book that can fit these criteria, but we would love Sybil Ruppert’s only monograph.
Which five books would you have on your syllabus for aspiring artists and photographers?
Knot: JH Engstrom’s Sketch of Paris; Mike Kelley, Catholic Tastes; Bruce Hanley and John Waters, Art: A Sex Book; Mark Borthwick, Margiela 2001; Thomas Galler, Palm trees, Sunsets and Turmoil.
Visit Knot at Twos, 258 Hackney Road, E2 7SJ
Supporting Material offers obscure books, ephemera and research, as well as free online resources, presented as Steal This Fire, a project curated by the artist Anna Howard. Orders can be dispatched in the mail or collected in person from Twos’ project space, which they share with Knot Bookshop. Howard’s philosophy regarding stocking the shop is guided by the desire to find books which both demand attention and elicit reaction.
For anyone who hasn’t been to the shop, what should they expect?
Supporting Material: A small, curated display that lives alongside T-shirts from twos.
What are your specialities?
Supporting Material: Out-of-print art, design and photography books, with a selection of posters and ephemera. I love early salesman’s sample books and mixing scarce antiquarian books with more recent out-of-print publications that are lower in price.
Which three words best describe your ethos?
Supporting Material: Books are tools.
What would be your dream book to get your hands on?
Supporting Material: The grass is always greener, so something another bookseller has, like Dieter Roth, Gesammelte Werke, Band 1, 7 or 8, which Donlon Books currently has. Or a beautiful scrapbook I saw at Perfect Lives, with pictures of performance art in the Slade in the ’60s.
Which five books would you have on your syllabus for aspiring artists and photographers?
Supporting Material: Selling books and tutoring run side by side for me, so from my experience of what elicits the best results, I’d say Art of the Sixties, which was designed by the artist Wolf Vostell. The bent acrylic spine, acetate pages and bolts binding it together have inspired many students I’ve worked with to DIY publish.
Also, Mémoires by Guy Debord and Asger Jorn. I’ve never actually seen this IRL, but the idea holds enough value. The sandpaper cover was deliberately designed to damage the books next to it on a shelf, and inspired The Durutti Column’s first album.
A Document Made by Paul Thek and Edwin Klein. Aerial still lifes of life’s detritus, printed at 1:1 scale and laid out almost like a broadsheet.
I don’t sell the next two, but I own copies. I like recommending books that people can find in libraries too. Of contemporary publications, Vinegar Sniffs by Roxy Lee – a point-and-shoot record of London’s queer club culture. And Coexistence or Hackney Flowers by Stephen Gill. His conceptual and process-driven approach demonstrates how the process of making a photograph can become as important as the subject itself.
Visit Supporting Material at Twos, 258 Hackney Road, E2 7SJ.
Owned by Bruno Halper and Daniel Lichtenstein, who host an NTS show of the same name, Perfect Lives focuses on offbeat books, records, ephemera, fashion and collectable material. They stock everything weird and wonderful, from poetry, photography, art and design to countercultural texts, lecture collections and vintage erotica. Born from a mutual collecting obsession, the shop started exclusively online before morphing into a permanent store, open Wednesday to Sunday, in the middle of Hackney Road.
For anyone who hasn’t been to the shop, what should they expect?
Perfect Lives: Us bickering.
What are your specialities?
Perfect Lives: The shop focuses broadly on the postwar avant-garde, counter and subculture, experimental music and art, photography, poetry and fiction, erotica and the occult. We’re really generalists with slight and shifting fixations. Most of our stock comes through house clearances, so the shop is partly shaped by the specialities of the recently deceased, filtered through our tastes and whatever grabs our imagination. A collection of catalogues indirectly from Francis Bacon’s estate taught us a lot and still informs what we stock; more recently, clearing the house of the founder of the Contemporary Music Network has pushed us further into experimental and contemporary music.
Which three words best describe your ethos?
Perfect Lives: Aleatoric, open, inept.
What would be your dream book to get your hands on?
Perfect Lives: What excites us most is coming across the stuff we didn’t know existed. But we have been trying to complete our collection of Heathcote Williams and Tony Allen’s early-70s squat-listings newsletter, The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency.
What five books would you have on your syllabus for aspiring artists and photographers?
Perfect Lives: I think we’d shy away from being didactic at all. But having said that, here are five nice things in the shop recently that have opened our eyes or interested us a lot…
Publication by David Lamelas; Shuji Terayama’s Les Gens de La Famille Chien-Dieu; a nice run of Rat magazine after its radical feminist takeover; Bob Cobbing and Peter Meyer’s Concerning concrete poetry; Reservations by Diane Keaton.
Visit Perfect Lives at 278 Hackney Rd, London E2 7SJ.
Egyptian-born Claire de Rouen first opened her bookstore, originally above a Soho sex shop, in 2005. A profound hit with students and seasoned creatives alike, this one is more established than the other shops on this list, but worth mentioning because it’s a truly special place, unique in housing legendary names beside arcane ones. Following Claire’s passing in 2012, the shop came under the direction of Lucy Kumara Moore and is now curated by Chantal Webber and Dominic Bell. Commemorating their 20th anniversary in May 2026, the shop has moved to an expanded space in Shoreditch as they continue to source rare, out-of-print books, photographic monographs and cultural artefacts.
For anyone who hasn’t been to the shop yet, what should they expect?
Mati Manicardi: Since opening in 2005, Claire de Rouen has been well known among art book lovers as the place to find the most varied selection of photography, fashion, and art rarities, alongside a curated selection of contemporary titles, limited editions, and magazines.
Anna Plowden: We have a pretty neat little spot under the bridge on the border of Shoreditch. This stretch of Kingsland Road is known for its fantastic Vietnamese restaurants, and the train runs right above our heads (when one drives over, the building shakes). So there’s a bit of a dramatic feel to the place. The shelves are awash with all sorts of books. Some are pretty rare, some are pretty wild! Our community expands a little every time we move, and this feels like the perfect place to be right now for hosting London’s creative community. People tend to hang around here and chat. They’ll sit down and read a bit of a book. Then there is our programme: launches, talks, book clubs. These are evenings where the shop is full to the brim, and people spill out onto the street.
What are your specialities?
Mati Manicardi: There is no particular rule behind our selection process; it’s simply the result of collective spontaneity, curiosity, and thoughtful research.
Anna Plowden: Rare old books, curious ways of thinking, time machines. Specialist photography and art books. Fashion catalogues, magazines and publications.
Which three words best describe your ethos?
Anna Plowden: I guess all good bookshops are part-glam, part-nerdy, part-freaky-by-nature.
What would be your dream book to get your hands on?
Anna Plowden: There are so many, it’s hard to say. I guess we all have our own winding lists in our heads. Recently Dom brought in a small handmade scrapbook where someone had watched John F. Kennedy’s funeral on TV, taken Polaroids of the television, and stuck them all into this little book.
One of my most treasured books at home is an old pervert’s diary that I found by the bins outside my first flat in London. It’s full of cut-outs, love letters and smut. So something along these lines… a perfect self-made book. There must be one hiding somewhere!
Main location: 11A Kingsland Road, E2 8AA
Second location: Alaïa’s flagship store – 139 New Bond Street, W1S 2TL
Started around 2018, Record 28 offers unique titles from the worlds of cult music and film, counterculture and photography, as well as a collection of playlists. Founded by Nick Mennell, the shop began as a side gig grown out of his book-buying obsession, and its mission is to be an educational resource and community. As mentioned in an interview with Select / Co, Mennell’s guiding principle is somewhere between hunting and hoarding, and he is especially concerned with finds which are at once illuminating and confounding.
For anyone who hasn’t been to the shop yet, what should they expect?
Nick Mennell: Expect a space that functions like an evolving, shoppable visual archive. It’s essentially the exact shop the teenage, art-curious version of myself was constantly searching for whenever I went anywhere but couldn’t find. It is compact, visually dense, and entirely tactile. No two visits feel the same. It’s the kind of place where you’ll usually find something you’ve spent years wanting to see in person, right alongside something incredible you’ve never heard of before. Everything on the shelves has an edge to it, and I like to think there are no filler titles. You are always encouraged to look through anything and everything here, with no books off-limits or locked away.
What are your specialities?
Nick Mennell: I’d say what really gets us going is photography and fashion-adjacent imagery with an edge, subcultures, and visual history that usually sits outside the mainstream. Most of our books are heavily visual titles, rare and out-of-print photo projects, 90s and 00s fashion imagery, counterculture, underground film, youth movements, punk, queer, and DIY.
Which 3 words best describe your ethos?
Nick Mennell: Curated, cult and collectable
Which five books would you have on your syllabus for aspiring artists and photographers?
Nick Mennell: I thought it made the most sense to build a syllabus straight from our current stock. These five titles mark foundational moments in documentary photography, subculture, and fashion visual culture, and best of all, you can actually come in, pick up, and flip through every single one of them in the shop right now…
First, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986). A vital lesson in love, loss, intimacy, and photography as a living extension of yourself. Second is Larry Clark’s Tulsa (1971). It proved that the most compelling stories come from inside a subculture, not from an outside observer. Next, Ed Templeton’s Teenage Smokers (1999) – a masterclass in capturing youth culture, identity, and the beauty in mundane suburban grit.
Fourth is Camilla Nickerson & Neville Wakefield’s Fashion Photography of the Nineties (1996). This is a required collection of imagery for understanding the shift away from the glamour that defined the 80s into the raw, real, grunge-era visual storytelling that defined modern fashion.
Finally, Corinne Day, Diary (2000) is an indispensable work in autobiographical photography. It bridges the gap between the changing world of 90s fashion and intense personal reality, teaching photographers the power of uncompromising honesty and intimacy over a polished final photograph
Visit Record 28 at 61 Hackney Road, E2 7NX.