The Bookseller.com

3rd December 2008

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In the lap of luxury

12.06.08 Hannah Davies

The name’s Bond. Bentley Bond. Or, to be precise, the Bentley Bond Spec­ial Series edition of Devil May Care, Sebastian Faulks’ take on 007, published by Penguin last month.

This luxury edition is designed to impress. Its hand-stitched cover is burnt oak leather, a unique edition number is embossed on an alu­minium plate and a specially designed pewter toy Bentley can be found inside. The 100 UK copies, priced at £750 and only available through Penguin’s website, sold out within two hours.

Penguin is not the only company to join the luxury publishing trend. This month, Collins is offering a personalised, made-to-order luxury version of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World. Prices range from £1,500 to £3,000 and customers can choose between French calf or Nigerian goat-skin bindings, and silk or linen slipcases. In October, Bloomsbury is publishing a leather-bound limited edition of Heston Blumenthal’s Big Fat Duck Cookbook (£1,000). It comes with two silver gift items from Bond Street jeweller Asprey.

Combining lavish book production, exclusivity and top-tier pricing, titles such as the Bentley Bond are a far cry from half-price mass market paperbacks on sale in the supermarkets. This movement counters the trend in the book trade for deep discounting and falling average selling prices. So what is driving publishers to tackle the high-end market?

Most retailers pinpoint the start of the luxury publishing trend to photographer Helmut Newton’s SUMO, released by Taschen in 2000. The huge coffee table book was signed by Newton and limited to 10,000 copies. It first sold for £1,000, complete with its own display stand, but prices rose up to £6,000 this year, just before the print run sold out. Roy Enticott, sales director at Taschen UK, says: “SUMO put us on the map in terms of this sort of publishing. We wanted to do something completely different and knew that with Helmut Newton being a world figure, there was a collector’s market out there.”

The Greatest

Since SUMO, Taschen has published four to five luxury titles a year in subject areas ranging from sport to architecture and pop culture to fashion. Its biggest success has been GOAT (Greatest of All Time): A Tribute to Muhammad Ali. Published in 2004, GOAT has been sold in two editions at £2,000 and £6,750.

Enticott says it was inevitable that other publishers would follow Taschen’s lead: “Books have been cheapened in recent years because of all the discounting. There is only so far you can go in terms of pricing downwards, both for retail price and margins. It is no surprise that some publishers are publish­ing at the other end of the spec­trum, where the market isn’t so volatile.”

Several specialist luxury publishers have crop­ped up in recent years. In 2005, Ovais Naqvi, a co-­editor of Taschen’s GOAT, set up his own publishing company, Gloria, with the sole aim of producing limited-edition, luxury books. Publishing one title a year with a maximum print run of 2,500, Gloria has so far released three large-format books: Pelé, Superyacht and New York.

With the books retailing from between £2,000 for a Samba edition of Pelé and £7,500 for the Columbus ­edition of New York, Naqvi mainly sells direct to wealthy collectors and high earners.

“Our customer base is typically ultra-high net worth,” he says. “So we focus on rich subjects, which have a high-value customer potential.”

The right formula

Kraken Opus was set up in 2005 by former investment banker Karl Fow­ler to publish limited-edition titles on similarly iconic subjects, such as Manchester United, Vivienne Westwood and Arsenal FC. Kraken aims for the highest end of the luxury market. The Champions edition of its F1 Opus title, due in December, is taking pre-orders at £20,000.
Michael Sawyer, Kraken Opus’ marketing director, knows his customers well and pinpoints three types: “There are the dedicated fans, with an emotional affinity to the subject; the investors, who might ask us to store several copies of a book—as you would wine—until they have increased in value; and, increasingly for us, the corporate customer because the Opus is proving to be the ideal corporate gift.”

Robert Clark, senior partner at consultant Retail Knowledge, says that when luxury books are done right, the rewards can be great: “The luxury market is the ultimate end of the gross margin conundrum. If you get it right and you know what you are doing, it is highly profitable.”

However, traditional trade publishers, such as Penguin, Bloomsbury and Collins, have core business in the mass market world of heavy discounts. Can they really join illustrated publishers and exploit the niche luxury market?

On the bandwagon

Jamie Camplin, m.d. of Thames & Hudson, which has successfully produced luxury books with exclus­ive brands including Bulgari, Car­tier and Chanel, is sceptical. “Some of the publishers jumping on the bandwagon are heading for trouble. The whole point of this kind of book is to make it utterly distinctive, with infinite attention paid to mater­ials, content and presentation. It is impossible to instantly invent a company culture to produce that kind of publication.”

Naqvi has similar reservations: “There is a certain amount of opportunism that is creeping in, which I see when trade books are simply re-bound and then publishers try to charge £2,000 . . . essentially, it is milking the franchise.”

The production quality of a limited edition is certainly crucial. Kate Gunning, product manager for Foyles, which has stocked luxury titles at its upmarket Selfridges store, says: “The really high-end stuff has got to be immaculately produced. A lot of the luxury books, as well as being low margin, are firm sale, so retailers are committing a lot of money without the possibility of returning the goods. You need to be as confident as you ever can be that there will be a market.”

Retailers also need to market and sell luxury books in a different way, with strong hand-selling and a retail environment that makes high-value customers feel comfortable. This is difficult to do in chain bookshops—and even in specialist art shops.

Clair O’Leary, book buyer for Tate Modern and Tate Britain, admits “struggling” to sell some of the high-end art and design books. She says: “Essentially, because we are very busy, we feel it is difficult to offer customers a one-on-one ex­perience. The market is out there but you can’t just drop the books willy-nilly into any shop.”

Despite these challenges, both the limited-edition projects Penguin has undertaken have created a big media stir and sold out very quickly. Its first luxury project was to celebrate Penguin Classic’s 60th anniversary with five designers, including Paul Smith and Manolo
Blahnik, commissioned to create a special edition classic. At £100 each, with a print run of 1,000 copies per book, the Designer Classics sold out within two months.

Penguin appears to have found a niche with mid-range limited edition publishing. Alongside the Bentley edition of Devil May Care, it produced 500 copies of a £100 version in an exclusive deal with Waterstone’s, which also sold out instantly on the day of publication.

Janine Cook, fiction buyer at Waterstone’s, says: “Taking 500 copies of a book that retails at £100 is always going to be a punt but we were confident that Devil May Care merited it and we worked closely with Penguin, making sure that our exclusive version was truly special.

“We would never say never again to producing a similarly high-spec version of a new book, but Bond is a hard act to follow.”

Designer binding

Penguin has another Classics venture planned for this autumn, with six titles being leather bound by designer Bill Amberg and sold at £50. However, Retail Knowledge’s Clark is pessimistic about the current economic climate’s effect on mid- to lower-priced luxury publishing. He puts luxury goods buyers into two tiers: the very top end and a mid- to lower range of customers, who spend aspirationally.

The top end will continue to buy, Clark believes, but mid-range books will be bought by the lower tier, who will be more affected by poor economic conditions. He says: “The Penguins of this world might be more exposed.”

But Joanna Prior, group publicity and marketing director at Penguin, insists the company’s motivation is not just the bottom line.

“It has not been about the revenue,” she says. “It has been about creating excitement and a sense of exclusivity about what we are doing.”

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