All MENDO-made books
Made and published by us
We don't just sell books... we make them too, which you can see in the showcase of our 33 MENDO-made books. Here’s the story of how our MENDO publishing house came to be.
At MENDO, we’ve always been designers. The idea to start a bookstore was conceived when founders Roy and Joost still ran a design communication agency, and was led by their affinity for images, for beautiful books and the love for paper.
In seventeen years time, the Berenstraat flagship store has become a household name. And it was in that store that customers, who were asking for particular books, planted the seeds for what would lead MENDO to become an international publishing house that creates and curates books. As our general manager Roy Rietstap says: ‘We’d like to share our insatiable hunger for visual inspiration and aesthetics’.
Like the origin story of the store, our publishing house started with our home town. Amsterdam was born from our interminable love for the always developing city of Amsterdam, and it wouldn’t be the only publication about our the Dutch capital that we would make. ‘It’s great to showcase the city’s beauty – it’s an endless inspiration to us,’ Roy says.
It’s the inspiring spirit that can be conveyed through all of our Amsterdam books. Books like Amsterdam, The Amsterdam Canals and the uniquely designed Pontsteiger focus on inspiring (parts of) the city, other MENDO-made books focus on the city’s ever-developing creative sector. The Workshop, for instance, offers a unique glimpse in the creative spaces of Dutch artists, and the recently published MOAM collects Amsterdams creativity by featuring contemporary Dutch creatives.
‘ We’d like to share our insatiable hunger for visual inspiration and aesthetics. ’
‘ We’d like to share our insatiable hunger for visual inspiration and aesthetics. ’
Another Amsterdam-focused book, Starring Amsterdam, boasts photos of visiting, groovy celebrities in the 1960s and 70s. The publication contains search suggestions to find out more about the portrayed artists online, connecting the online with the offline world of print. Roy: ‘we’d like show people from generations that grew up with only books, what the new generation of online photographers is creating’. That connection is also essential for books from the ‘Streets Of’ Collection and Depart, which let that new class of photographers leap from online photography to the offline world of print, providing them a tangible chapter in their legacy.
‘We’d like to offer social media photographers an offline platform,’ Roy says, ‘to show others that photography is changing without losing quality’. In that sense, #SENDNUDES also responded to the zeitgeist, featuring online photographers who captured female ‘nudes’ in a new and unconventional manner. ‘Just as unconventional is Ferry van der Nat’s Mr, that can be seen as a contribution to gay emancipation. We wanted to make an alluring book that boasts male nudity, which is interesting for both men and women’.
Van der Nat is just one of the many photographers we teamed up with to create lasting monographs. The first international success came with High Tide, created with the surf photographer Chris Burkard, but also Oscar Abolafia’s Icons by Oscar, Klaas Jan van der Weij’s Sportret, Adam Katz Sinding’s This is Not a F*cking Street Style Book and the MENDO-initiated Carli Hermès monograph are good examples of extraordinary overview books.
In the gradual process of setting up the full-on publishing company MENDO came to be, some of the MENDO men worked more and more from our Herengracht office. Here, our love for paper, ink and color will also in the future be the incentive to create even more books. In July, for instance, the first monograph publication of talented photographer Pie Aerts will be published, which will collect the worldly photos he has shot on his journey looking for real stories about real people. One month earlier, another travel book will see the light, which is the sequel to This Is Not A F*cking Street Style Book by Adam Katz Sinding who documents the zeitgeist of places all over the globe.
You can browse all MENDO-created books here.
All MENDO-made books in figures
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Lauren Greenfield visited MENDO to sign Generation Wealth
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