Leading me through the back room of his Upper East Side bookshop, John McWhinnie brushes past a signed and inscribed first edition of Ulysses (which he would later sell for a million dollars, possibly the highest price ever for a 20th-century book) to reveal something that holds a deeper resonance, at least for somebody who came of age listening to the Sex Pistols and the Damned: a leather-bound volume of the first 11 issues of Search & Destroy, published between 1977 and 1979. "This is one of the most important punk magazines of all time," he says, carefully pulling a second volume from a shelf. "Along with Sniffin' Glue."
In the hidebound world of rare booksellers, McWhinnie isn't exactly an iconoclast. His shop, spread out over two floors of a brownstone on East Sixty-fourth Street, opened three years ago under the patronage of Glenn Horowitz, one of the titans in the field (the store's official name is John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller), and McWhinnie's salt-and-pepper hair and fluent elocution give him a professorial air. But at 40, he's younger than his immaculate shirts might suggest, and as a connoisseur of the avant-gardes of the 20th century he's leading rare-book collecting in new directions. In addition to first editions in pristine dust jackets—Catch-22, Vladimir Nabokov's own copy of Lolita—he stocks a museum-quality selection of vintage Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren Seditionaries T-shirts ("Marc Jacobs bought some") and psychedelic blacklight posters.
"I don't follow trends, and I never wanted to follow the market," McWhinnie says, sitting in a tastefully distressed Eames Aluminum Group chair. "I'm a curator who happens to sell rare books." And there is no book rarer than the unique maquette for Sam Haskins's sultry 1964 photo essay, Cowboy Kate. It's the printer's mock-up, constructed by hand with the photographer's original soft-core, soft-focus images of nimble young things playing dress-up, and the pages are thick with black tape and Magic Marker retouches. "It's a living piece of art," McWhinnie says. "It's so intimate, even the best photo books can't compare."
Some of McWhinnie's most interesting titles come from his own imprint, JMc & GHB. Every three months or so he publishes an original book designed in collaboration with one of New York's edgier artists: Richard Prince, Matthew Barney, Terry Richardson. Each one is a work of art, limited to 500 to 1000 copies. They're surprisingly affordable, usually going for between $45 and $250. Deluxe editions can be as much as $15,000, and include objects made by the artists themselves. "John knows more about what I like and what I want than I do," Prince tells me. "He's one of the few people that do."
A book collector who creates collectible books: It's an intellectual backflip that delights McWhinnie. "I have an allegiance to artists who upend assumptions," he says. "I'm happy to play my role, and do it for the bibliophiles."
