In an interview on Extraordinary Art Books

Do you publish art books or make them?

I publish art books, but that also means I’m very involved in making them. I work closely with the book designers, the writers, the artists – everybody who’s part of making an art book come into being.

And how did you come to it?

I had just finished my PhD and was working as an archivist in the New York University library, which included a collection of papers which had belonged to this guy who had been an avant garde theatre agent, promoter and producer. He collected everything from taxi stubs to amazing theatre posters. I made a small exhibition out of the collection, went on to do an internship at a place called Aperture that published art books, started writing about them in magazines, and then met this South African publisher called David Krut. We went out for lunch and he suggested there might be some free lance work for me back in Johannesburg. By the end of lunch he’d asked me to run the publishing arm of his company.

So in at the deep end?

Yes.

Tell me about your first book, Eikoh Hosoe’s, Ba Ra Kei/Ordeal by Roses.

It’s a beautiful book, originally published in the mid sixties. It arose out of this very unusual collaboration between the photographer, Eikoh Hosoe, and the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Hosoe had been commissioned to do a portrait of Mishima for a collection of essays. Well the portrait was one thing, but Hosoe took a lot of other photographs. They became a document of Mishima’s fascination with his own body. These two men produced an extraordinary book together, but on the eve of its publication, Mishima – who was obsessed with purity and the way of the Samurai – committed ritual suicide. Eikoh Hosoe realised subsequently that this book had been part of a testament, a will, a preparation for the suicide. I think Mishima was 38 when he did it.

Why did he kill himself?

It’s difficult to say. He had an odd childhood – he was raised by his grandmother. He was very isolated as a child. Later he was a very prolific writer. He wrote over 40 novels, he was an actor, he wrote drama, he wrote essays. But he was also obsessed with his own physicality. He was a weight trainer, he did sword fighting – he even established a private army.

A real army?

Yeah. He tried to bring off a coup in Japan. He tried to depose the military government in order to re-establish the old imperial government and emperor. But of course he completely failed and this is more or less at the time of his suicide. He did the suicide by having one of his young protégées behead him with a sword.

Ouch.

So this book is deeply erotic – fascinating. The photography’s extraordinary. There are a couple of other remarkable characters related to this book that I don’t have time to go into now. I’m interested in a number of Japanese photographers, but I first encountered Mishima when I read one of his short stories in a collection and it was a story about ritual suicide: an army officer who had dishonoured himself and who impaled himself on his sword. And his wife has to commit suicide with him.

A phenomenal narcissist.

A very conservative man.