On a recent Saturday afternoon, a storefront on East Fourth Street in Manhattan emitted a mysterious pink glow. Vinyl film over the windows obscured its contents to passers-by. Customers left carrying parcels in sheer latex bags.
It was not a sex shop, but another kind of place that might make you tingle: a bookstore.
Inside Climax, a dealer of rare books and ephemera, a fashion design student wearing fringed boots flipped through a Vivienne Westwood monograph. Other shoppers — a musician, a stylist, a consultant and her obedient boyfriend — browsed collections of work by Juergen Teller and Martine Syms.
The aluminum shelves were punctuated with neon plastic erasers, a collection of short stories by Mary Gaitskill, assorted erotica and a guide to cake decorating from the 1970s. What did these offerings, which cost anywhere from $4 to several hundred dollars, have in common?
“I think it’s a feeling,” said Isabella Burley, 35, who is easy to spot among the stacks because her hair is the shade of Twizzlers. The onetime editor of Dazed magazine, she is now the owner of this tiny East Village shop and its sister store in London, where she grew up.
Climax, she said, is meant to be a place where a first edition of a 1994 photo book by Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki documenting youth subcultures in Tokyo might brush up against a collection of Marc Newson’s spaceshippy interior design. “That sort of weird tension between things is more interesting to me than, ‘Oh, we only sell fashion books.’”
Yet Burley’s idiosyncratic taste has attracted a fashionable clientele. Alexa Chung and Paloma Elsesser are regulars; the store has hosted book signings for designers including Simone Rocha. In 2024, Climax released a $250 set of ruffled mesh underwear in collaboration with the brand Chopova Lowena that swiftly sold out.
It’s the latest brush between the fashion and literary worlds, which have been flirting for years now. Consider that Prada enlisted the author Ottessa Moshfegh to write short stories for a campaign last year, or that the designer Anna Sui staged her fall 2024 runway show in the Rare Book Room at the Strand.
The store is also breaking through in a moment of obsession with broadcasting one’s personal taste. “The Gen Z girl who loves the Miu Miu show and buys everything thrifted — that’s who is going to this shop and buying stuff,” said Lauren Sherman, the host of the podcast “Fashion People” and a fashion correspondent at Puck.
Burley’s vision for Climax, with its dose of sex appeal, is particularly of the moment, Sherman added: “She’s capturing what desire looks like right now.”
During a lull between customers, Burley slipped off a pair of furry Phoebe Philo slides and settled in on a butter yellow bench in the corner of the store. She wore a silver necklace with the name of her dog, a spindly whippet named Bambi.
Like many book dealers, Burley started out as an obsessive collector. When she wasn’t running Dazed — a role she assumed at age 24 — or working at Helmut Lang and Acne Studios, she was trawling the internet for copies of Madame in a World of Fantasy, a female domination fetish magazine first printed in the 1970s, or hunting for a German periodical for rubber enthusiasts called Gum. She found their pages to be glamorous, sexy, bizarre.
“It was really just like, ‘I need this — I don’t know why,’” she said.
Over about a decade, Burley’s collection expanded to include photo books by Penny Slinger, Nigel Shafran and Carrie Mae Weems, but it was not until the coronavirus pandemic that she had time to think about what to do with all of them. She had considered building a reference library or digital archive, but settled on an online bookshop.
The name Climax came from a garment label featuring cartoonish red lips that she had seen several years earlier at a vintage clothing store in Manhattan. “It was so confronting, but also so camp,” she said.
A bad time for the world turned out to be a pretty good time to buy and sell books. Climax appeared online in September 2020 with a stock of about 100 items, half of which sold the first day. Her living room, and eventually her spare bedroom, too, were overtaken by merchandise.
Burley does most of the buying for Climax herself, online and at secondhand bookstores scattered across the United States, Europe and Japan. She is learning how to drive in part because she wants to venture to more remote places for buying trips. “The sourcing most of the time happens at 3 a.m., in bed, on my laptop, going down some crazy internet hole of an artist or someone I wasn’t familiar with,” she said.
After a temporary takeover of the ground floor at the Sadie Coles gallery in London in 2023, Climax opened permanent storefronts in the East Village in 2024 and the Clerkenwell neighborhood of London the next year.
Climax’s offerings have come to extend well beyond printed matter. This year, the store hosted a Valentine’s Day event with the artist Laila Gohar, who designed stainless steel bookmarks for Climax shaped like kidney beans, and a signing for the release of a new book by the photographer Petra Collins.
There is also a social media series, “Under the Cover,” which features celebrities and artists talking about their literary influences while browsing Climax’s shelves. In one installment, Elsesser, the model, holds up a copy of “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison. “I remember reading this book when I was in the sixth grade and being pretty disturbed, but it made a lot of sense,” she says.
All of this has added to Climax’s cachet at a time when other bookstores in the city — High Valley and Dashwood Books, for example — have also attracted cult followings. It probably did not hurt that Timothée Chalamet recently visited Climax to browse with the director Aidan Zamiri and shared a picture from the store with his 21 million Instagram followers. (He also bought a book about the graphic design of Japanese shopping bags.)
“Stores like this are what make reading cool, collecting books cool,” said Ava Nirui, the former creative director of Heaven by Marc Jacobs. The day I visited the store, she had come by to catch up with Burley but could not resist picking up a colorful collection of Shoichi Aoki’s portraits of street style in Tokyo.
Other visitors that afternoon took home books by Gary Indiana and Sofia Coppola. A handful who came in seemed mostly focused on the store’s $185 cropped hoodies and Day-Glo baby tees: One woman bought a yellow crop top that read “Dial ‘C’ for Climax” for $100 and wore it out of the store.
Was there any concern that the “book” part of bookstore risked being overshadowed as Climax’s cultural footprint grew?
Burley cringes over words like “merch” and “content.” But she increasingly thinks of Climax as a brand, in addition to a place to buy first-edition hardcovers. The T-shirts and TikToks do seem to be helping to get customers in the door, where they might buy a key chain and also might find themselves flipping through a 1997 book of sketches by the artist Rita Ackermann.
Burley was speaking about that dynamic when a young woman wearing oversize Chanel eyeglasses came into the store and made a beeline for the register.
“I’m looking for a very specific book,” she said.
