Cult London bookstore Tenderbooks has been pioneering independent publishing for the past decade, garnering a reputation as a haven for rare art, design, fashion books and ephemera. Nestled on Cecil Court – which has slowly earned the apt nickname of Bookseller’s Row – Tenderbooks’ owner Tamsin Clark has built a space for publications that may go unnoticed in the mainstream, resulting in an eclectic mix of one-off publications from legendary photographers, emerging zines and long-lost artefacts. Alongside the extensive array of books, the store also has an everchanging event programme, ranging from evenings with renowned author Deborah Levy to installations from American photographer Sheila Rock.

In honour of Tenderbooks’ tenth anniversary, we asked Clark to curate a list of must-have photobooks fit for your coffee table, ranging from Daido Moriyama’s photographs of cats to behind-the-scenes snippets of Nigel Shafran’s fine art imagery.

“The filmmaker Chris Marker is definitely the reason I became interested in photobooks. Originally published in 1982 and now available as a new English-language edition, Le Dépays is a collection of photographs and texts about Japan. The photographs gathered here show street life intertwined with ritual and ceremony – sleeping faces on the subway, worshippers at street shrines, dancers at public festivals, cats and totems. The attention and quickness of the filmmakers’ eye inevitably invites comparison to Marker’s collaborator William Klein and perhaps also to Daido Moriyama, since the majority of these portraits are shot in the Tokyo district of Shinjuku. Marker’s account of his favourite neighbourhood with its small bars and cat temples is just one instance of a seamless move between text and image, making the location appear warmly familiar. This compact and understated photo-essay, is in my view, a quiet masterpiece.”

“Bill calls itself ‘a magazine without words’. It’s a publication that could be at home on the photography shelf as its pages are mainly composed of photographic images. Yet, it is not quite a photo publication. It has the chic feel of a glossy magazine and each time I pick it up I’m struck by what a gorgeous object it is. The pages of the current volume offer up many different textures of the photographic image: waves hitting the shore, a tin of Nivea moisturiser, plant specimens, horses in the sea, stacks of bagels in a bakery… Imagery I find compelling, beautiful and continually puzzling. Sometimes there’s no need for words.”

“The Public Life of Women is an extraordinary publication containing a visual archive of over 500 images relating to feminist activism in Nepal. The richly printed pages are a visual map of Nepali political culture: from the vernacular photography of personal photo albums, to photos showing women protesting and gathering, to scans of newspapers, posters and handwritten letters. The act of making this archive of imagery public in a book form is a powerful insistence that the histories contained therein are circulated and preserved.”

“This publication beautifully produced by Japanese publisher Akio Nagasawa has a wraparound photographic cover silkscreen printed onto a heavy canvas. Picking it up you instantly feel like you’re holding onto an artwork. This volume is dedicated to images of stray cats that Daido Moriyama encountered on the streets of Tokyo. For all its slimness and elegance this is a book-work that is heavily charged with atmosphere and attention.”

“Workbooks collects together forty years worth of pages from the working notebooks of photographer Nigel Shafran. This book is fascinating to me because it lays bare all the stuff at the peripheries of a practice. Notes, sketches, clippings and everyday ephemera are all carefully assembled. It’s not just a book full of ideas, it’s a book about how ideas germinate.”

“Ginza Kaiwai/ Ginza Haccho, is a seminal book echoing the well-known artist book Every Building on the Sunset Strip by Ed Rusha, only this incredible publication from Japan precedes it by over a decade. The little known photographer Yoshikazu Suzuki meticulously photographed the shopping district in Tokyo and the result is a two-meter-long elevational panorama of Ginza printed in accordion fold. You can see the elegant Shiseido store nestled against a cinema, galleries and chic department stores. While the design of Ruscha’s iconic artist book is conceived exactly like this one, it remains unclear whether the artist had seen the vernacular equivalent to his work.”

Tenderbooks is located at 6 Cecil Ct, WC2N 4HE, check them outline here and on Instagram here.