Judged By Their Covers

How the Assoulines made their name on books to be seen (and occasionally read).

- By Matthew Schneier

Up the stairs, behind the balustrade, a modern cabinet de curiosités hangs above Fifth Avenue. It is a library guarded by a pair of statuary sheep and scattered here and there with fair-trade woven masks from Africa and vintage Louis Vuitton trunks. On its rich shelves are books bound in leather or linen or boxed in wood that attest to the great glories of world culture: the art of Picasso, the furniture of Chandigarh, the design of Coco Chanel, the cola of Coca-Cola.

Here, on the mezzanine of the Plaza Hotel (though you would find similar outposts in the Four Seasons, the Mark, the D&D Building for the architecture-and-interiors trade, or the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles), is the world according to Assouline, where everything is beautiful, expensive, and chic. 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.”