Marta Hallett and Princess Alfrieda.
Photograph by Douglas Kirkland.

Don Bachardy, author of Hollywood.
Photograph by Mark Ruffalo.

Photographers Harry Benson, Douglas Kirkland, and Jean-Pierre Laffont
at the launch of Photographer's Paradise: Turbulent America 1960-1990.
Photograph by Benjamin Petit.

Calvin Klein and author Christopher Makos.
Photograph by Evan Falk.

Paul Zone's Playground: Growing Up in the New York Underground
launch party and exhibition at Lethal Amounts, Los Angeles.

Authors Hunt Slonem and Michael Clinton
at the launch party for Slonem's Bunnies at Paul Smith, Soho.

Illustrated book publishing is an art. It requires an exquisite sensitivity to detail that is balanced by an understanding of the big picture and its many moving parts. To be a publisher of printed matter in its most luxurious form is found in the ability to master the balance between picture and word. It is in the ability to perceive the book as the whole greater than the sum of its parts, and that each book on the list plays a role in the larger program in which it sits.

In the twelve years since Marta Hallett launched Glitterati Incorporated, the company has come into its own as a purveyor of luxurious books befitting the modern age. With the win for 2014 Lucie Award for Publisher of the Year for Photographer’s Paradise: Turbulent America 1960-1990 by Jean-Pierre Laffont, Glitterati pays its respect to the primacy of photojournalism in the history of the United States, and its enduring ability to bare witness as nothing else ever could.

Photographer’s Paradise is the first photojournalism book on the Glitterati list. Hallett instinctively understood the photographs she saw, and how to assemble the book. From a preview of just twenty prints, Hallett told Jean-Pierre and Eliane Laffont that the book would be organized by decades, and that it would need to be large. There would be no skimping on a volume of this magnitude. The end result was 392 pages. 359 four-color and black-and-white photographs. 2 gatefolds. And the book was sized at 10 x 13.5 inches. It weighs 10 pounds. It comes in English and in French. Sir Harold Evans wrote the introduction. And Jean-Pierre Laffont traveled the fifty states in a powerful and provocative examination of the American Dream—the good, the bad, and the beautiful.

It is this search for beauty and the pleasure that it brings that compels Hallett to publish as many books as she sees fit. She observes, “To publish a great book—a classic—I need to feel as though I can’t not publish it. I just cannot allow someone else to publish a book that I see completed in my mind’s eye from the first moment I chance upon the raw material, or to ignore those encounters that because of someone’s innovative work, I am inspired to see the world in a way that I didn’t before I met that gorgeous original material.”

It is this sensitivity that makes Hallett an ideal publisher. She perceives the book before it is born and gracefully guides it along what she likens to Stations of the Cross. Authors, she observes, have their own journey and it is she, as publisher, who helps them deal with the challenges they face along the way. It is in this way that she builds on-going partnerships with artists such as Fernando Botero, Hunt Slonem, and Don Bachardy; photographers Douglas Kirkland, Christopher Makos, and Howard Schatz; and magazine publisher Michael Clinton. These authors have produced some of Glitterati’s top performing monographs over the years. Books like Kirkland’s Coco Chanel: Three Weeks/1962, which caught the eye of Karl Largerfeld.

Coco Chanel: Three Weeks/1962 has been a top performer for Glitterati since the book’s initial release in 2008. It is an intimate volume, very tender and personal, and in this way it has appealed to collectors of not just books, but of photographs. A third limited edition featuring a new print of Mademoiselle wearing sunglasses will be released with Fall, in a clothbound clamshell slipcase holding the book and a singed and numbered print in an edition of 100.

Hallett observes, “I love working with Douglas Kirkland. Here is a person who could have been resting on his laurels for the past 20 years and is still out there roughing it on movie sets, taking pictures, educating young talent about the wonders of photography. He doesn’t stop and he is an inspiration.

“I could name hundreds more. One of the wonders of being a publisher, especially when it is one’s own company, is that you can make the decision to work only with people you like and admire. That’s an incredible thing. It allows me to spend time with some of the most intelligent, wonderful people in the universe—and every one of them having some sort of impact (usually positive!) on the world in which we live.”

Links
For more information, please visit Glitterati Incorporated 
Curated by Miss Rosen 

 
A young girl reading Fanny the Flying French Bulldog by Nelson Bloncourt.

Mister Finch: Living in a Fairytale World launches at Anthropologie UK.

Marta Hallett and Fernando Botero present Bullfight: Paintings and Works on Paper
at the Andean Society. Photograph by Charles Dexter.

The Gals of Glitterati Incorporated:
Sarah Morgan Karp, Gayatri Mullapudi, Jessica Guerrero, Mara Hallett, Sara Rosen, and Ellen Brown.
Photograph by Enrique Pastor.

...and the 2014 Lucie Award for Book Publisher of the Year goes to Glitterati Incorporated
for Photographer's Paradise: Turbulent America 1960-1990 by Jean-Pierre Laffont