Sleeping by the Mississippi by Alec Soth is one of the defining publications in the photobook era. First published by Steidl in 2004, it was Soth's first book, sold through three editions, and established him as one of the leading lights of contemporary photographic practice. This MACK edition launches to coincide with the first exhibition in London dedicated to the series at Beetles+Huxley gallery, and includes two new photographs that were not included in the previous versions of the book. Evolving from a series of road trips along the Mississippi River, Sleeping by the Mississippi captures America's iconic yet oft-neglected 'third coast'. Soth's richly descriptive, large-format colour photographs present an eclectic mix of individuals, landscapes, and interiors. Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, Sleeping by the Mississippi elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing, and reverie. 'In the book's 46 ruthlessly edited pictures', writes Anne Wilkes Tucker in the original essay published in the book, 'Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex.' Like Robert Frank's classic The Americans, Sleeping by the Mississippi merges a documentary style with poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust. Thirteen years since the book was first published, the artist's lyrical view has undoubtedly acquired a nuanced significance - one in which hope, fear, desire and regret coalesce in the evocative journey along this mythic river.

Berenice Abbott is one of the most significant figures in photography and her accomplishments in the field were more wide ranging than any of her contemporaries. Berenice Abbott not only offers a comprehensive retrospective of her complete oeuvre, encompassing all the primary projects she undertook in her 60 year career, but also presents this work in context with her other accomplishments: inventor, author, teacher and photo historian. This two volume book is the definitive publication on the life and work of one of the masters of the photographic medium. Volume I contains Abbott’s portraits beginning in Paris in the 1920s. They include many of the most notable and influential writers, artists, politicians and personalities of the day. Less known aspects of her work are also well represented, such as her images of the American Scene including her ground breaking US Route 1 project and her Portrait of Maine in the 1960s. Also in Volume I is Abbott’s final major undertaking considered by many to be her crowning achievement – documenting science. It consumed her from 1939 to1961, culminating with three triumphant years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, producing work of astounding beauty and clarity for the Physical Science Study Committee. Volume II is devoted to her photographs of New York. The monumental project Changing New York documenting the physical and social changes of the city in the 1930s is supplemented by her photographs prior to and after that work as well as those of Greenwich Village in 1947/1948.

Limited edition of 2,000 sets Berenice Abbott was one of the most versatile photographic artists of the twentieth century and her work has been published and publicized since the beginning of her career in 1925. She is best known for her Paris portraits of the 1920s and her documentation of New York City in the 1930s but, like most great artists, Abbott’s reputation has rested on a small portion of her life’s work. For every time one of her most famous photographs has been published there are many others that could have served the same purpose but were not used because they are less well known. In Abbott’s case there is an unusually large body of unknown work because during the most potentially creative time of her life, the circumstances of her existence were very complicated, largely due to lack of work and income, particularly between the years 1929 to 35 and 1940 to 1959. Many of the photographs she did manage to create in those years were not sufficiently commercial to attract a publisher and she was financially unable to publicize them on her own, develop a project to its natural conclusion or, in some instances, even undertake a project of interest. The Unknown Abbott attempts to correct this situation and make some of Abbott’s outstanding but largely unknown work available to a wider public. Gerhard Steidl had published the two volume Berenice Abbott in 2008 and Documenting Science in 2012. These books are currently out of print but are going to be reissued by Steidl in the near future. Steidl met with the editors Hank O’Neal and Ron Kurtz in late January 2011 to discuss future Abbott projects. This was when they began thinking of a series of Abbott books, dealing with various aspects of her career. Hank O’Neal and Ron Kurtz have chosen to present five volumes of work, ranging from her earliest photographs in New York City to documents of American cities before the Civil War, vigorous lumberjacks in California’s High Sierra Mountains, the sophisticated bohemia of Greenwich Village as well as the amusements of Daytona Beach. The Unknown Abbott is a very ambitious project that will present hundreds of outstanding Abbott images for the first time. Her reputation is already very secure, but these previously unknown images will further clarify the range of her photographic activity beyond her portraits in Paris, Changing New York and Documenting Science.