Glitterati Incorporated is the brainchild of Marta Hallett, who has left her distinctive imprint on illustrated and art book publishing since she began her illustrious career in 1973. After serving the industry on the corporate side for nearly thirty years with positions at the helm of houses including HarperCollins, Smithmark, and Rizzoli, Ms. Hallett founded her independent boutique publishing house in 2002 with the aim of taking her wealth of knowledge and expertise, and cut out the arduous bureaucracy of corporate culture, and to create books on her own terms.
This Fall, as Glitterati Incorporated celebrates its 10th anniversary, the company announces its partnership with Antique Collectors Club for distribution in Europe. The partnership will allow Glitterati to reach new markets with titles that speak to a wide array of discerning tastes. The Glitterati list specializes in high-end illustrated tittles dedicated to elevating the discourse in art and culture.
This Fall, Glitterati’s list continues to awe with the magical collection of photographs by Douglas Kirkland With Marilyn: An Evening/1961. This book is the fourth by Kirkland with Glitterati; his previous tomes include Freeze Frame, a five-decade retrospective of work on Hollywood sets; Coco Chanel: Three Weeks 1961, a collection of never-before-seen photographs of the icon at the end of her career; and Michael Jackson: The Making of Thriller, featuring the only photographs taken during the filming of Michael Jackson’s landmark music video. Taken together, Kirkland’s monographs illustrate all that is best about the Glitterati brand: the distinction of the author’s vision as presented through the art direction and production of each title; the quality of original content and cohesiveness of storytelling; and the ability to create books that are captivating in their ability to stop time so that with each of these tomes we can consider the magic of the moment with each page we turn.
Kirkland is one of the many stars in the Glitterati stable, each author being a distinctive personality in their own area of expertise. From everything from fashion and beauty, architecture and design, to photography and film, food and lifestyle, travel and children’s books, the authors on the Glitterati list enable Ms. Hallett to develop mutually empowering partnerships with organizations and corporations including Barney’s New York, Bergdorf Goodman, Calvin Klein, Colony Club, Cooper Hewitt Musumn, Essence Magazine, Grand Hotel Villa d’Este, International Center of Photography, Louvre Museum, Macy’s, Marc Jacobs, the Mariinsky Theatre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Natori Company, New York Botanical Garden, Saks Fifth Avenue, and the Studio Museum of Harlem. among others.
As Ms. Hallett observes, “I choose the name Glitterati because all of my authors have ‘day jobs’; that is, they have a platform, although it’s not usually a publishing platform. To me this is the brave new world of what the future of publishing will be: an opportunity for innovation and flexibility to respond to the marketplace; a real chance to see what is happening in the world and attach the business to it; and making a decision about where the world will go and then producing a product to go in that direction.”
With this spirit of innovation and dedication to advancing the art of illustrated book publishing, the Glitterati list for Fall 2012 hold lots of surprises. In addition to the delicious portraiture of Kirkland, Glitterati will also release Lance Out Loud, a tribute to Lance Loud, the first national American reality television star from the seminal 1973 PBS program “An American Family”; Thank You Andy Warhol, an homage to the inspirational lessons of the twentieth-century’s most influential pop art philosopher; Inside the Favellas, the first photography book shot inside the notorious slums of Rio de Janeiro; The Centre Cannot Hold, a fifteen-year retrospective of the wildlife photography of David Gulden; Tattoos Hornets Fire: The Millennium Sweden in which Christopher Makos and Paul Solberg envision the pictorial dimension of Steig Larsson’s luminous novels; and Kafkanistan, a new style of “tourist” journalism through the countries of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan.
As Ms. Hallett notes, “The most rewarding aspect of running my own company has been seeing books that we’ve published (that I knew would not have been taken on by another publisher) succeed not just in terms of sales number but receive recognition as the finest books published. The other aspect that is deeply fulfilling is the actual ability to create and control the destiny of books, to be able to collaborate with other creative people to make something more wonderful than any of us would have made on our own. I love working with creative people whose goal is just to make the best possible work!”
Miss Rosen
