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At Four Corners Books we seek to bring art history to life. Our aim is to explore unfamiliar corners of visual history, share the stories we find, and publish them as well as we can.

Run by Richard Embray and Elinor Jansz, we’ve been making books since 2003. Our aim is to create a space to reflect on artists and creative outputs from our recent past that have often been overlooked. It’s our mission to champion this creativity, in an accessible way.

We’re interested in those hidden pockets of art that can spark a bit of joy. Books that can amuse or educate, challenge or intrigue, delight or provoke. They are more than books about art. They are a way to experience it.

Contact

Publishing enquiries

Our main focus is art historical, with a particular interest in British art and design from c. 1945 to c. 2000; art or design that appeared outside of the art world, or work that wasn’t made for a gallery context; ephemera, protest, overlooked work, or collections that give an insight into social history.

Our books are primarily visual, although alongside that, we love to commission historians and art historians with new and interesting stories to tell.
For the most part we do not publish art theory or artists’ books. However we also occasionally commission artists to produce new illustrations for classic novels in our Familiars series. We are only able to commission titles in that series sporadically as these books are often slow to make.

Please contact us by email in the first instance. If you are a retailer wishing to make a trade order, please refer to our distributors listed below. 

hello@fourcornersbooks.co.uk


Four Corners Books, registered charity 1125471. Registered company 6591195. Company limited by guarantee, registered in England.

Trade enquiries / distribution:

UK & ROI: Art Data
North America: Artbook
Elsewhere: Idea

Shipping

Books purchased through our website are sent out via 2nd Class post (in the UK) at a flat rate of £1.99 per order, and via Standard International post (rates dependent on weight and destination), for other countries.

Our store is IOSS ready, which means that for parcels sent to EU addresses, VAT is charged at the rate specified by the destination country.

If you have any queries regarding orders, please email

hello@fourcornersbooks.co.uk

Stockists

  • Arnolfini, Bristol
  • Artwords, Rivington Street & Broadway Market
  • La Biblioteka, Sheffield
  • Claire de Rouen
  • Colours May Vary, Leeds
  • Donlon Books
  • Foyles, Charing Cross Road
  • Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
  • ICA Bookshop
  • Koenig Books
  • Magalleria, Bath
  • Magma
  • Papersmiths, Bristol
  • Serpentine Gallery
  • South London Gallery
  • Sunday Books, Dublin
  • Tate Britain
  • Tate Modern
  • Tenderbooks
  • Ti Pi Tin
  • Village Books, Leeds
  • Waterstones, Gower Street
  • Waterstones, Garrick Street
  • Waterstones, Piccadilly
  • Whitechapel Gallery

Credits

Design by John Morgan studio
Programming by Benedict de Silva
Pictures by Four Corners Books

News Archive

19.2.2025
IMG 4365

Remembering Martin Lee (1941-2025)

We are very saddened to hear of the death of Martin Lee, who managed print production for us Four Corners Books for nearly two decades. Our thoughts are with Martin’s family and friends. Martin had been a founding partner of Omnific with Alan Kitching and Derek Birdsall in the 1970s, and by the time we came to work with him his name had become a byword in the industry for attention to detail and a wealth of knowledge. In 2015, we were working on a book about Sister Corita and the designer,...

We are very saddened to hear of the death of Martin Lee, who managed print production for us Four Corners Books for nearly two decades. Our thoughts are with Martin’s family and friends.

Martin had been a founding partner of Omnific with Alan Kitching and Derek Birdsall in the 1970s, and by the time we came to work with him his name had become a byword in the industry for attention to detail and a wealth of knowledge.

In 2015, we were working on a book about Sister Corita and the designer, Nick Bell, pointed out that the vibrancy, especially all the fluorescent colours, of her screenprints was going to be difficult to achieve without an expert to help us with the printing. Nick introduced us to Martin Lee who told us: ‘I love solving problems’. He did, and we were delighted with the results that he was able to achieve: the 8-colour book is still in print and he ensured that each reprint was at least as good as - if not better than - the first.

Working with Martin shaped our work in other ways too, namely through the skilled and wonderful people he introduced us to, including designers, reprographers, and of course, printers. As someone who had spent many years as a printer himself, Martin knew everything there was to know about the machinery of the huge litho presses and also understood design so he could advise at all points of the production process. Not only was Martin very generous in sharing his knowledge, he was also continually learning about new technologies and processes to keep himself up to date and get the best possible results in printing. We brought many challenging productions to him over the years, and he relished finding solutions for them. There are so many different things that Martin did for our books over the years to make them as good and as beautiful as they could be and we are deeply indebted to him.

The last book we worked on with Martin was Shiraz Bayjoo’s edition of Treasure Island, brilliantly designed by John Morgan. Printed using UV inks on uncoated paper, with a printed cloth cover, it was an immaculate piece of book production.

We will miss him very much.

29.1.2024
4 Corners Dracula Spine Tghtr

Free Books for Libraries

We believe that everyone should have access to books, so we try to make ours as affordable as possible. But to make our work reach an even wider audience, regardless of income, we supply copies of our books free of charge to lending libraries.   If you work in a library in the UK which would like to add a selection of our titles, please get in touch. It might be a university, school or public library - as long as the books are free to borrow, we are happy to supply them. We will be pleased...

We believe that everyone should have access to books, so we try to make ours as affordable as possible. But to make our work reach an even wider audience, regardless of income, we supply copies of our books free of charge to lending libraries.  

If you work in a library in the UK which would like to add a selection of our titles, please get in touch. It might be a university, school or public library - as long as the books are free to borrow, we are happy to supply them.

We will be pleased to send your library up to four books free of charge, subject to availability. If you’re a library who we have previously supplied to, that does not disqualify you from asking for further titles. Please email us at hello@fourcornersbooks.co.uk and we will do our best to send your books as soon as we can!

3.9.2017
Sugarbeet

Eyeball To Eyeball: A CB Radio Q&A

Writer William Hogan and photographer David Titlow are the authors of our new book about British Citizens Band Radio Culture of the 1980s, and more specifically the Eyeball Cards – the business cards of ‘breakers’ exchanged when meeting up in person after chatting on the airwaves. We asked them about their own experience of the wonderful world of CB radio and Eyeball Cards.

Read the article
31.8.2017
Eyeball Cards Front Cover

Introducing Four Corners Irregulars

We’re proud to introduce our newest project, one that we’ve been beavering away at for over a year now: Four Corners Irregulars, a series of books presenting a new look at the history of modern British visual culture. We have chosen a wide range of different subjects, ranging from politics to hobbies, and stretching from 1945 to the present day. All are linked by the remarkable visual creativity that has happened in Britain outside of art galleries and museums. Some of the artworks we will...

We’re proud to introduce our newest project, one that we’ve been beavering away at for over a year now: Four Corners Irregulars, a series of books presenting a new look at the history of modern British visual culture.

We have chosen a wide range of different subjects, ranging from politics to hobbies, and stretching from 1945 to the present day. All are linked by the remarkable visual creativity that has happened in Britain outside of art galleries and museums. Some of the artworks we will feature were made by people who wouldn’t have considered themselves artists, many more were, but who nevertheless chose to make their work seen outside of a traditional gallery context.

Each book will provide an overview of its subject, and together the books will add up to a portrait of our own histories – at times passionate, at others frivolous, but more complex and multifarious than the myths we sometimes tell ourselves about being British.

The first volume is by William Hogan and David Titlow, about Eyeball Cards, the mysterious business cards created by CB radio enthusiasts in the late 1970s and early 1980s. CB radio ‘breakers’ would chat over the airwaves at a time when the technology was yet to be legalised and, taking a lead from US CB culture, would create handles for themselves to help keep their identity a secret. It’s these invented identities that the Eyeball Cards immortalise, calling cards for ‘Lollipop’, ‘Rubber Duck’, and ’Blue Eyes’. These are amusing, occasionally mundane, dark or bawdy, but always personal creations — flotsam from a more innocent analogue world. The result is a window into an outpouring of creativity that prefigures online identities — social media handles before there was even an internet.

The book presents hundreds of the funniest, strangest and most intriguing Eyeball cards from across the UK. In addition, photographer David Titlow has taken portraits of some of the breakers who owned the cards, and writer William Hogan has written a lively history of how and why these cards came to exist.

Eyeball Cards will be published on 12 September, priced £14. It’s a hardback, with 192 pages. It’s Four Corners Irregular #1, and we’ll be announcing details of further books in the series over the coming weeks.

See the book
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