17 April 2025 |
The by-appointment only shop in Brooklyn is a treasure trove for magazine lovers.
There is nowhere else in the world quite like High Valley Books. The 50,000+ copies of vintage niche fashion tomes, Japanese zines and of course, 10 Magazine, grow like an avalanche inside the basement and ground floor of Bill Hall’s three-story Greenpoint Brooklyn home, which also functions as a by-appointment-only shop. Students, designers, creatives, and collectors circle the tiny aisles and tables completely stuffed to the brim with books, expanding to tumbling stacks all over the floors. Any and all available space that may have once been vacant is filled while a black cat sleeps silently on a small orange couch perched above an explosive mountain of towering Barneys New York catalogs, portrait photography coffee table examples, and flattering brand books written like bibles.
But Hall keeps his most personally prized books in the corner of the room: a 17th century French edition of Don Quixote passed down from his parent’s library, Gloria Steinem’s The Beach Book with a dust jacket that doubles as a tanning screen, and a 1964 Charlie Brown book. He stores some of his other favorites, like a cut-up edition of Irving Penn Flowers acquired from an advertising agency and a handmade one-of-a-kind leather bound book of different calligraphy samples, among the endless ocean of magazines.
“This is all fashion, ephemera, catalogs, and look books,” says Hall as he motions to the main table on the first floor. “And it was fun when I had one drawer and now I have three, but there’s no end to it. It satisfies a certain urge to collect. I used to always look for used clothes like Pendleton shirts and vinyl. But now, I don’t even really recognize this as something that I created. It’s just sort of overwhelmingly grown.” Hall now builds his book collection from art directors, other collectors, industry insiders, and fashion designers in bulk, picking up everything from entire archives of Vogue Italia to rare issues of Harper’s Bazaar magazine. He used to bring suitcases full of books back from international trips, but these days the books come to him. “When you’re a book dealer, you tend to know very little about an awful lot of things.”
And yet, books are in Hall’s DNA: “My parents have tons of books,” he says. “My mother’s an art historian. My father was a big reader and we inherited generations of family books going back to the 18th century.” Look up when you’re gazing through that archival issue of 10 Men, and there’s Hall’s great-great grandfather in the form of a porcelain bust on the top of one of the shelves. “He presides over the bookshop. He was the first district attorney of New York.” As for Hall, the path to High Valley might have been informed by his family but still was indirect. With a background in visual arts, he first came to New York City to be a painter only to find himself in the early ‘90s working for a rare book dealer on the Upper East Side. From there, he opened his first shop in 1999 in south Williamsburg.
Stepping into High Valley Books is not for the faint of heart. One could spend a full day there and not see half of everything. The buzzer keeps buzzing and more and more and more people come through, weaving through the dimly lit, cavernous basement full of treasures: massive groups of students, people doing research projects and fans of dying print media galore.
“First editions and things, collectibles, that’s not really what’s going on here,” he says. That means everything from old Sotheby’s and Christie’s catalogs to things you think you’d never come across. “I once found a library from a shoe designer and he had literally over a hundred trade Greek sandal magazines from the ‘50s. Crazy things. They were just so much fun and so exciting to look at.” Some of his rarest finds? A complete set of Minotaure magazine, the Surrealist title from the 1930s, or a copy of 67 Polaroids by Guy Bourdin, the legendary book that had to be destroyed due to copyright issues.
It’s a bookstore but it’s also a meeting place–and above all else, a rare thing: one of the greatest collections of objects open to the public in New York. Everyone from funeral directors to Balenciaga designers has come through High Valley Book’s doors, and Hall tries to create a salon-like environment; introducing everyone in the room while rattling off fun facts about obscure books and even more obscure people. He frequently makes thoughtful book recommendations to anyone who wants them. While two young people were in conversation over old copies of Paper and i-D, Hall presumed they knew each other. “We literally met right at the door and just started talking about how much we love magazines,” said one.
“I always felt like an observer or someone who’s mildly interested in fashion,” he says, in between answering the buzzer. He became interested in fashion only after reading the biography of Diana Vreeland, and Salvatore Ferragamo’s Shoemaker of Dreams by chance. But now, he just so happens to cater mostly to those in that world. “It’s funny, when you have so much stuff like this, it’s hard to feel like you possess anything.” One fact is true: you never know what you’re going to find at High Valley Books, and it might even turn you into a hardcore collector yourself.
