About & contact CT Pocket

CT Pocket was a four-month experiment for a pop-up arts bookshop in Southeast London’s Deptford. CT Pocket was located inside the contemporary art gallery BEARSPACE from September to December 2009.

To launch the venture, celebrated curator and writer Hans Ulrich Obrist hand-picked 15 must-have new titles for any discerning reader to be featured and sold at the store. These include Michael Clark’s first monograph and Yoko Ono’s latest book, Anton’s Memory. In addition to this inspiring list, CT Pocket stocked a rigorously edited selection of new and second-hand books (and periodicals) dealing in artist monographs, theory, special editions, music and architecture; each in their own way inspiring, rich in content and meticulously produced.

The project was an opportunity to see how artists’ books are received by the public, and if there is a future in art book publishing and for art book shops. I am now working on the evaluation, shortly to be published. This will give insights into digital versus physical media, book production, marketing and business in the arts.

CT Pocket is intended to continue but in a digital format. I will continue to collect interesting books for sale online, sell my own work, and ask culturally hot producers to contibute reading lists and suggestions for building a contemporary art library. More ambitiously I am interested in cataloging personal libraries from key figures in contemporary art. “A catalogue of someone’s library is a social act that allows the larger outisde world to see into someone’s private life.” Seth Siegelaub, in conversation with Jonathan Monk, published in Jonathan Monk, Cover Works, published by Bookworks, 2004