On the 3rd September 2009 Charlotte Troy, a freelance publisher and editor, will open CT Pocket: the first arts bookshop in Southeast London’s Deptford. CT Pocket is a mini arts bookshop and will be located inside the contemporary art gallery BEARSPACE. Deptford is a fast growing arts ‘hub’, recently described by the New York Times as ‘a boisterous concoction of blue-collar aesthetics and intermittent hipsterism’ – and, with its high concentration of artists, a growing legion of galleries, Goldsmiths University, arts festival Deptford X; new Tate Trustee Bob and Roberta Smith recently declared the area as ‘sexy’. CT Pocket hopes to alleviate a local thirst for knowledge about contemporary art and aims to be a place for people to find out more and talk about art today.
To launch the venture, celebrated curator and writer Hans Ulrich Obrist has hand-picked 15 must-have new titles for any dis¬cerning reader (see p.2) 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 will stock 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. CT Pocket will also host occasional book launchs or talks, curated around the guest editor’s list of books.
Charlotte Troy publishes under her imprint CT Editions, and her personal work is interested in asking nosey questions of the culturally hot. For Q&A (2007), an experiment for a print publication, she sought answers from pop icons such as Terry Hall, Peter Saville and Susan Hiller; in Dispense and Connect (2008, part of the Hayward Gallery’s 100 Ideas), Charlotte brought together international editors Sina Najafi (Editor, Cabinet), Bice Curiger (Parkett), Barry Miles (writer and editor, Publisher of International Times, underground press syndicate), and Maria Fusco (The Happy Hypocrite) to discuss periodical art publish¬ing; and forMAN-MADE (2008) a pop-up shop which sold multiples of only one item daily (2008), she asked design historian Emily King to select an object for the store. For Charlotte Troy the bookshop is just the same as publishing: her goal being to disseminate ideas and enable correspondences; as David Hockney once said: ‘Art is about correspondences – making con¬nections to the world and to each other.’