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info@tokenbooks.co.uk

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ABOUT

Token Books began in the autumn of 2020 when we were living together in London during the covid pandemic. In the absence of most other things important to our sense of what the world could hold, we started ordering books because they could fit through our letterbox, and their value as a form of questioning how we can know something outside ourselves was more acutely felt. We researched artists, writers, photographers, designers, the intricacies and intimacies of whose work caught our attention. 

The books we collect are from the mid 20th century to the beginning of the present century. They are usually published by small presses in relatively small print-runs; out of print and difficult to find. We sell first editions, both because many of the books have never been reprinted, and because we are invested in the material culture of the book as object and wish to contextualise their contents as closely as possible with the people who made them. 

The word ‘token’ comes from the Old English tǽcean, ‘to show’, a word from which the verb ‘to teach’ is also derived. Historically, a token could mean ‘a spot on the body indicating disease,’ ‘something remaining as evidence of what formerly existed,’ ‘a sign or presage of something to come,’ ‘something given as an expression of affection, or to be kept as a memorial; a keepsake or present given especially at parting.’

A book will almost always be tokenistic in that it is only ever a partial and approximate representation in paper and ink of something not there, not made, words and images selected from a reality that is not materially selective. We hope nevertheless to show books that renew a desire to be taught, affirm breakages of conceptual and behavioural norms, and present transgressive ways of seeing beauty and knowing wonder. 

Florie Harding and Esther Sorooshian