The top five books of European managing editor of Vice, Bruno Bayley

I always had a hunch that Bruno Bayley was the kind of guy with a great bookshelf – you can just tell that he’s a hoarder of the weird, the kind of person who would rather stumble upon someone’s diary in a forest than, say, a suitcase full of cash. London-based Bruno is the European managing editor of Vice, which allows him to take his curiosity for the dark corners of the world and pump them out to those who want to know but perhaps can’t be bothered to look. His articles are some of the best on Vice at the moment, so go and check them out after you’ve read his deeply interesting, peculiar top five books. Excuse us while we go and subscribe to the Fortean Times…

Ken Miller: Open All Night

Partly because of my job, and partly because of my longstanding interest in reportage photography, I see a huge amount of photo-essays about subcultures, marginalised people, outcasts, counter-cultures, or whatever you want to call them. It’s very hard for me to explain what it is that makes Ken Miller’s book stand out so much for me, and it’s also semi-pointless as the introduction to the book by William T. Vollmann does a better job than I ever could. His introduction is almost a perfect (and very succinct) definition of what makes truly great photography. I won’t try and paraphrase it here, but his blunt, surprisingly aggressive and evocative mini essay in the front of this book should be compulsory reading for any aspiring photographer. Miller’s photos of 1980s San Francisco’s drop outs and gangs are accompanied by snippets of Vollmann’s writing from his novels and short stories – many of which are unnervingly good fits for the images and characters they sit beside.

From the skinheads to the EST casualties, the combination of the photos and the text in this book really conveys these groups, not as “isolated bugs on the windshield, but parallel worlds of hermetic secrets," as Vollmann says. Off the back of this book we got in touch with Miller for the 2010 VICE Photo Issue and ran some of his amazing photos of the then-semi-legal medical weed. I called him up and he was halfway through reflooring his living room and now only really does wedding photography. I interviewed him about this book, and it’s here if that’s of any interest.

Grobisce: Society, Politics and Mass Graves

Back in 2007 my super friend Ben Freeman (of Ditto Press) asked me to help him edit this book, which in retrospect was brave of him as I am dyslexic, ill-organised, have a very short attention span, and hadn’t really done anything like it before. I think this was the first publishing project I ever became fully engrossed in, and it was something that really set me off toward being interested in publishing and books from the creative end, rather than the consumer one.

It’s all about Slovenian mass graves – which is cheery – and is made up of interviews with survivors, relatives, forensic scientists and historians alongside a collection of harrowing archival letters and reports from 1945. The editing and arranging process involved weeks in a windowless room in the RCA with printouts and photocopies Blu-Tacked to walls and us running about with highlighters trying to hammer all the content into some sort of cohesive unit.

It was my first really involved creative undertaking. We were an hour or so from finishing the book when we looked at it and realised that it was going to be fucking boring organising it the way we had: the obvious way, as a series of interviews… So we went back to square one and merged all the interviews along subject lines instead, which took another few weekends of Blu-Tacking, but made it ten times better. Looking back, the way he and I approached this book – paying real attention to its arrangement and looks as well as content – and being so bold with it was probably partly because I had never done anything like it before. And that attitude is a real feature of all Ben’s work at Ditto.

Ethan Hoffman and John McCoy: Concrete Mama: Prison Profiles from Walla Walla

I bought this for £10 off Val Wilmer, an amazing photographer, journalist, civil and women’s rights activist and music historian. Once a year she has a book sale at her house where there’s red wine in plastic cups, an array of fascinating people, and of course – all the books, posters, cassettes, and records that she wants out of the house piled up on every flat surface available.

The book is an amazing depiction of life inside “Concrete Mama,” also known as “Walla Walla,” or less excitingly “Washington State Penitentiary.” At the time the book was made the prison was revolutionary because it allowed its fractious inmate populations to cultivate their own lifestyles and have a certain level of self-rule. Aryan bikers were allowed to run mechanic shops and ride their bikes in the yard, Native American inmates could conduct traditional sweat ceremonies, and so on. The photos are paired with an equally amazing extended article and profiles of the key prison figures. It’s a bit like watching all of Oz, but it’s real and has no grating slam poetry interludes.

John Michell and Robert J.M Rickard: Phenomena

Things like this, and a horrifying 1970s book called FREAKS were the sort of things I dug out of my father’s vast collection of books in our home while I was growing up. In amongst the first edition novels, travel, art, design, and photography books were odd things like this which I still can’t really imagine my dad buying. This book got me obsessed with unexplained phenomena and led to me hunting down the Fortean Times at train stations for years to come.

I have no credulity when it comes to supernatural explanations of these phenomena, whether it’s showers of frogs or “asbestos people,” or phantom cottages, but I love reading about them. This book’s also crammed with wood-cuts and amazingly grainy, spookily, badly-reproduced photos of stigmata, abductions, demons, weeping statues and the like – all of which I used to draw and re-draw for hours. Now I spend more time reading CSICOP’s site than forteana, but still – this book got me hooked on the world of the so called “unexplained” and the ever-present battle between believers and skeptics. The book looks incredible.

Aviation Scrapbooks

This is a bit of a cheat as there are two books, and they aren’t really books in a formal sense. One was given to me by my grandfather who made it during the war, the other was given to me by my ex-girlfriend who found it god knows where. They are both incredible handmade scrap books to aid aircraft recognition during World War Two, built up from regularly occurring magazine and newspaper features of the time.

My grandfather’s (the larger one) is a thorough run-down of the era’s aircraft and their dimensions, stats, and specifications – including some rather unusual types – but I guess over five years they had time to get through a lot of planes. The other is really cool in that to further aid recognition, all the aeroplanes’ lines have either been exaggerated in the illustrations, or anthropomorphised, to help key features stick in your mind. So you have FW190s with long dangling “claw”-like landing gear, or owlish radial engined night fighters, for example. It’s also got some really extraordinarily racist personifications of Japanese aircraft which are probably best skimmed-over.