Herb Sundays 103 & 104: IDEA

Angela Hill (Herb 103) and David Owen (Herb 104) of London's book and curio empire, IDEA, come forth with a serious haul.

Herb Sundays 103: IDEA (Angela) (Apple, Spotify). Art by

Michael Cina

Herb Sundays 104: IDEA (David) (Apple, Spotify). Art by

Michael Cina

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“…All of these songs are drawn from a 24 hour plus playlist made for IDEA. We don’t actually use it in the store though. Angela has been buying vinyl and the record deck now feeds through the wall to second speaker in the new room. That speaker is a Teenage Engineering portable that allows you to rewind live radio (handy for cheating at quizzes). Angela’s records are a curious mix of Ravi Shankar, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Shirley Collins and Alice Coltrane (and the kind of artists featured on her playlist). Anyway, the 24 hour plus playlist is pretty much perfect shopping music and if you are wondering what that is - it is “More Than This” by Roxy Music” -David, co-founder of IDEA

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It’s a perfectly gloomy Sunday afternoon in January, around 5 PM, and upstairs at the offices/rare book room of IDEA, things are still humming. The married duo, Angela Hill and David Owen are finishing their day, but two books set to ship have gone missing. Angela is just about off to get food at the market to make supper with; David will remain back with me, generously answering questions as he works, going through the books like an unharried librarian cleaning up from the weekend.

I emailed them on a whim (learning lesson: it's always good to reach out, kids) when I was coming to visit, and they actually hit back. I find them about a week out from a long-awaited expansion of their space, which will make IDEA slightly more visitable by the public but still will be relatively concealed. The space is indeed the office and showroom but feels like someone’s private library. Since IDEA isn’t a “volume” seller, every piece here is quality, which is jarring at first because, as a used record or book person, your eye is trained to scan quickly and find one exciting piece out of twenty, but on these shelves, everything is exciting.

Angela and David would like to make you a coffee. Photo by Adrian Lourie, for The Standard

IDEA, started in 2009, has led a renaissance in used/rare book visibility by riding Instagram’s rise to the top of visual culture and maintaining a disciplined but whimsical voice that makes each discovery feel like a new crush, yours and theirs. Once they find a great title, they endeavor to keep it in stock as they can find it. These are what they call “Superbooks.” The term Superbook is an IDEA concept; it’s a canny way to say classic, but often, these books weren’t seen as or intended to be as such. A good Superbook is indeed not visually timeless or even refined in the sterility department. They are books of extreme character that are indeed of a time or the product of a particular moment and borne from someone’s strange curatorial urge to document it.

The best Superbooks are not the product of their current resale value but instead are judged as portals to other ways of thinking sometimes lost; they reawaken you to the playfulness of humans and expose an unspoken desire for mischief and insouciance in our species. IDEA hit that perfect mark between high brow and elegantly sleazy with their curation. No one is exploited, but it's not for prudes or even purists; it’s their own definition of cool, a form of hedonistic time travel.

I quip that IDEA has a knack for “making” these books, which increases the value, not unlike when someone like Gilles Peterson would unearth a cool Brazilian record pre-internet, but David gently corrects me. The high values that some of these and other books take on are not based on one dealer’s markup but are the result of a digital network of booksellers (check AbeBooks for a good example of the spread), which tracks the scarcity of certain titles and ascribes an arbitrary value to them. This is why you’ll often see 2-year-old books rise in value 10x. In fact, IDEA often sells far below these prices to keep its inventory within reach.

eye paralysis, by me

Before she went, Angela walked me through the room, which was organized loosely in sections (fashion, Japanese periodicals, rave/subculture, etc.). The “By Appointment” approach they’ve maintained helps them avoid the space from feeling overwhelmed. Angela has the vibe of the cool British aunt you wish you had, always taking you to movies or the flea market, expanding and sharpening your taste with each visit. I’m usually sort of afraid/prepared to be blown off by cool people, which happens, so I often unintentionally try to hurry communications along even if mid-stride (“Wow, thanks for making time, it was great to meet you finally” type beat), but Angela doesn’t take the bait and kindly engages me, asking me why I’m in town and about my family.

Their background informs their work or as Business Of Fashion shares: “Hill came from a background in fashion, having previously worked for Comme des Garçons and Browns, as well as assisting fashion editors and stylists in the late 1980s. She went onto pursue a career as a photographer, co-founding a magazine in the 1990s. Owen began as a journalist and editor of magazines on graphic design, photography and advertising. He then turned to the music business, digital and television, co-creating a show called Flipside.” Artists, designers, musicians, filmmakers, and others are their main repeat clients, seeking influence and inspiration offline.

David’s playlist reflects this omnivorousness and, in person, has a shark’s cool (and eye). He is a consummate observer and tracker, a great salesperson and merchandiser (his writing is the wonderfully overzealous IDEA “voice”). When Angela’s off, David resumes his search and answers my questions kindly simultaneously. You can see how they make a great team and how their collective styles inform the business.

David looks for those two books.

The taste engine of IDEA is a powerful force and one of the best examples of canon collapse. At IDEA, value is not in price but in charm, perspective, and feel. A 1986 Patagonia catalog is treated with the same reverence as a Wolfgang Tillmans monograph or a Hugh Grant teen pin-up magazine; it’s all in the texture of the thing, which is what makes IDEA, mainly known by their Instagram and the Dover Street Market kiosks ostensibly so potent. They have deftly added their own lines of quippy hats (WINONA is a hit) and totes as well as their own publishing line, reissuing old titles and commissioning new ones (David is kind enough to sell me an IDEA rave book at its original price, not its market value).

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I float the Herb Sundays playlist series to Angela and David, and how I’ve tried to avoid group playlists to date, instead hoping for a single authorship of each. I do love a good pair though (How Long Gone, Love Injection), so you can see the peanut butter and chocolate converging.

Angela jokes that their overlap in music taste is probably limited to Talking Heads, New Order, and Hall & Oates aka other groups you won’t see a collective playlist from anytime soon. Angela's mix is focused (“two more than the amount you are allowed on desert island discs”): Bach (the only composer that can really transport you can touch your soul your innermost fibers), Benjamin Britten's sea interludes (“reminds me of childhood”, the “most beautiful Police track,” a transporting Supertramp song, Fleetwood Mac (“Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks - so so much talent and beauty …always in floods of tears listening to this”), Beatles (“again cry every time”) and of course New Order.

I’ll let David take us out for today with a web of references and rabbit holes to explore:

The playlist I sent begins with Herb for Herb Sundays - Herb Alpert, in this case. I built the playlist one track at a time so Jerusalem sets the pace and the tone. I’m not musical and can only trust my ears and confidently say that there is something shared between the Herb Alpert track and the opening riff of Lou Reed’s Charlie’s Girl. 

Hot Chocolate are actually my favourite band. I could easily have made a total HC playlist. I often spend Sundays with only Hot Chocolate on endless Spotify loop. Quite how I didn’t included A Child’s Prayer I don’t know. It even has church bells! Van Morrison has two songs - really Errol Brown should have had A Child’s Prayer as well - please do just listen to it. 

Land of The Loops was chosen to break out from the otherwise endless Hot Chocolate replay. It’s a cyclical song, something I like a lot. John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy is a wonderful round and round spiralling piece of music (not included because I forgot it). I also love Werewolves of London because it is nothing but the same riff repeated throughout. Badly Drawn Boy's Silent Sigh does it too - all the way through with the same phrase - not sure why that isn’t on the playlist, it should be!!

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The Nick Lowe and Robert Palmer tracks make a nice pair. If Bowie’s New Career In A New Town was also in the mix, it would be a triptych of songs that seem to use various instruments as percussion - at least that’s how they sound to me. My other favourite sonic element is the canon shot - but that’s not very Sunday. It this had been any other day of the week you would have got The Waterboy’s Whole of The Moon, N-Trance’s version of Do You Think I’m Sexy.

All of these songs are drawn from a 24 hour plus playlist made for IDEA. We don’t actually use it in the store though. Angela has been buying vinyl and the record deck now feeds through the wall to second speaker in the new room. That speaker is a Teenage Engineering portable that allows you to rewind live radio (handy for cheating at quizzes). Angela’s records are a curious mix of Ravi Shankar, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Shirley Collins and Alice Coltrane (and the kind of artists featured on her playlist). Anyway, the 24 hour plus playlist is pretty much perfect shopping music and if you are wondering what that is - it is More Than This by Roxy Music. 

When we had an actual store on the street into which anyone could walk in, I would play early Industrial Estate era Fall tracks so loudly that people could hear it in Starbucks over the road. That worked as a sonic filter; even the most determined annoying people in the world can’t push through that kind of ear bleeding pain to do their annoying thing. I would just watch them, buffeted in the doorway by Cornershop’s Born Disco Die Heavy Metal (a song that is actually out of time) and watch their lips curl. When they eventually sloped away in defeat, I would flip back to Sultans of Swing…

Full credit should be given to Charlie Bones and his DoYou!! radio station. There are at least ten tracks on this playlist that I came to love from his morning show. Late in life too, which is always cheering.