The Cut: Judged By Their Covers: How the Assoulines made their name on books to be seen (and occasionally read)
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 various as cocktail-party chatter. Decorators and real-estate developers, two of the company’s most important and quickly growing 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.”
