62 THE CUT | MARCH 2–15, 2020
Up the stairs, behind the balustrade, a modern
cabinet de curiosités hangs above Fifth Avenue. It is a library
guarded by a pair of statuary sheep and scattered here and there
with fair-trade woven masks from Africa and vintage Louis Vuit-
ton trunks. On its rich shelves are books bound in leather or linen
or boxed in wood that attest to the great glories of world culture:
the art of Picasso, the furniture of Chandigarh, the design of Coco
Chanel, the cola of Coca-Cola.
Here, on the mezzanine of the Plaza Hotel (though you
would find similar outposts in the Four Seasons, the Mark, the
D&D Building for the architecture-and-interiors trade, or the
Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles), is the world according to
Assouline, where everything is beautiful, expensive, and chic.
The Assoulines—Prosper and Martine, the married founders,
and Alexandre and Sébastien, their sons—are librarians of
luxury, and their publishing house, which turned 25 last year,
is both a rhapsodist of, and a mouthpiece for, the international
fashion industry. Assouline’s books, more than 1,700 of them,
published at a rate of 60 to 70 per year, are on subjects as vari-
ous as cocktail-party chatter. Decorators and real-estate devel-
opers, two of the company’s most important and quickly grow-
ing client bases, now order full rooms’ worth more or less by the
pound. “The content is super-important,” says Prosper, sitting
in his wife’s office at the company headquarters on lower Park
Avenue, where shelves groaning with books line the walls. “But
99 percent of the time, a book is closed in your apartment. So
if it’s ugly, it’s a problem. It has to be beautiful.”
Since arriving in the U.S. in 1999 and settling permanently
a few years after, the Assoulines have often been tagged as a
publisher for socialites, which is true—Kelly Killoren Bensi-
mon was an Assouline author before she was a Real Housewife
of New York—but that description falls short. Assouline strives
to produce books by, for, or about any of the megacorporations
that peddle luxury (Chanel, Dior, Cartier) or that don’t but
aspire to (Coke, Mattel). And its founders look the part: Pros-
per, expensively tailored, his thinned-out hair slicked suavely
back; Martine, lithe and lavishly accessorized, expensive with
just a hint of French excess in her Louis Vuitton leopard-print
sweater. Alex, the younger son at 27, in a young-fogey suit and
suspenders, manages the business of the business (sales and
marketing), while his parents handle the more creative aspects
(acquiring, commissioning, and editing); 44-year-old Sébas-
tien, in Paris, focuses on designing their new experiments in
home décor. In conversation, Alex defers largely to his parents,
whose social fluency in contiguous, interspersed French and
English—Martine’s raspy, Prosper’s creamy—has been honed
by long years on the party circuits of the world. “They’re very
social, very networked,” says Ron Frasch, a retail-industry con-
sultant who has been friends with the family for years. “They
work very hard at it.”
Assouline isn’t the only publisher to work this territory.
Plenty of rival houses specialize in lavish photography and illus-
trated books and compete with Assouline for clients and their
reliable orders—august Rizzoli, intellectual Taschen, tony
Phaidon—all of which are involved in one way or another with
brand-fluffing publishing. But Assouline, more than any other,
fashions itself as a peer of the brands it services, so much so that
Prosper scoffs at comparisons to other presses. “I always say our
competitor is more Ladurée,” he says, referring to the purveyor
of high-end macarons. “It’s beautiful packaging. It’s good taste.
You want to go back every day. And it’s a beautiful gift.”
The family is not a “hawker” of catalogues, he says, though the
distinction can feel a bit squishy. A little more than a third of
Assouline’s sales come from its Ultimate line, a series of master-
piece anthologies that includes The Impossible Collection of Art
and The Impossible Collection of Design but also Louis Vuitton
Windows and The Impossible Collection of Bentley. One built-in
benefit of doing admiring books on or with companies is that
those companies agree, officially or implicitly, to buy a portion of
the print run to keep for themselves or to gift to shareholders,
clients, and journalists. Others are sold in stores. “Sometimes our
clients don’t have the budget to buy a Trinity ring or a $2 million
Cartier diamond,” says Michel Aliaga, Cartier’s associate director
of heritage information. “But they have the taste to buy a book.”
The family looked to fashion and luxury for inspiration early
on. Martine was the director of communications for the French
fashion label Rochas; Prosper was running a creative agency spe-
cializing in advertising for luxury brands. “At the time, shoes were
very important, and it was the beginning of Louboutin, et cetera,”
Prosper says. “Everybody was crazy about it. And the price of the
shoes was $600; it was huge.” Assouline saw that a book, properly
made and marketed, could be sold the same way, in the same
places, to the same clients. “C’est bizarre, but it is exactly this,”
Prosper says. Although early hits for Assouline were the palm-
size, 99 franc—about $15— editions from its Memoire series on
major designers and houses of fashion and jewelry, Assouline’s
books these days are generally more like objets d’art, and limited
editions may run into the five-figure range. The company recently
launched an XXL Collection of oversize books that cost $12,000.
After a few years, the Assoulines shut down the creative agency
and turned their attention to book publishing full time.
Their first retail space, opened in 2003, was housed on the
seventh floor of Bergdorf Goodman. The family hatched the idea
over dinner with Frasch, the department store’s CEO in the early
aughts, when Assouline was working on the design of the Berg-
dorf catalogue mailer. “There’s other presses that do interesting
books,” says Frasch. “But they’ve really found the niche in the mar-
ketplace.” Their customer was not a books customer; Prosper and
Martine had turned up their noses at Borders and Barnes &
Noble. “I told him our business is not in the bookstores,” Prosper
says. “We found our public at Bergdorf Goodman.”
The Assoulines do not carry themselves like inky publishers.
They are charming, courtly, Fronch, living and working sur-
rounded by art, fine cigars, and bourgeois-bohemian eclectic.
Their office conference room is an homage to Seville, their
favorite vacation destination, and is decorated with art and
antiques from their pilgrimages there. Their stores once sold a
scented candle meant to smell like cocaine. “I learned a lot
about the theater of doing business” from them, says Richard
Christiansen, who previously worked for Prosper as a creative
director. “The importance of walking into an office, opening
the door, and gasping because it’s so beautiful.” (He once
learned the hard way not to sneak wine out of the boss’s office
while burning the midnight oil; it cost a small fortune to
replace the bottle.)
Prosper and Martine draw a line between what they call “edito-
rial” books and “partner” books—those titles commissioned by
brands for occasions, a particular item or collection, or simply the