Veteran Bookseller Rudi Thoemmes Launches Foxed Editions, a New Photobook Imprint for Overlooked History

A veteran bookseller who has spent decades rescuing forgotten texts from obscurity has launched a new publishing imprint dedicated to photobooks that history left behind.

Rudi Thoemmes — an antiquarian bookseller, academic publisher and founder of the Bristol-based RRB Photobooks — unveiled Foxed Editions on 31 August 2026. He is joined in the venture by Björn Andersson and Jessa Fairbrother. The imprint will produce facsimiles (exact reproductions) of overlooked historical photobooks alongside new publications that map neglected corners of photographic history, according to The Art Newspaper.

The first two titles set the tone. One is a republication of Fred Judge's 1924 study Camera Pictures of London at Night. The other is Thomas Wiegand's 66 Books from East Germany, a survey of photobook publishing behind the Iron Curtain. Both fit the imprint's stated mission of rediscovering the photobook as a historical form, rather than merely as a vehicle for individual photographers.

Thoemmes brings a long and unusual career to the project. Under Thoemmes Press, an academic publishing house he founded, he produced several thousand reprints relating to the history of ideas — scholarly works that had gone out of print and were at risk of disappearing from library shelves. He later shifted focus to photography, setting up RRB Photobooks in Bristol, which has published photographers including Markéta Luskačová and Jem Southam. He also runs Photobook Bristol, a festival and gathering for the photobook community, and serves as a Trustee at the Martin Parr Foundation, the Bristol-based archive and gallery established by the British photographer.

The seed for Foxed Editions was planted a year before launch. In 2025, Thoemmes published Trees of Britain and Ireland, an edited single-volume edition of a sprawling, largely forgotten seven-volume set originally published between 1906 and 1913. The project proved that there was an audience for carefully resurrected photographic works — enough of one, at least, to justify a dedicated imprint.

The Foxed Editions mission statement, published on the imprint's website, confirms that editorial direction and production are led by Thoemmes himself, keeping the operation tightly under his experienced hand.

For readers who think of photobooks as glossy monographs by famous names, the Foxed Editions approach is different. The imprint is looking at the medium's margins: a century-old study of nocturnal London, a catalogue of books produced under the constraints of a vanished state, a botanical survey so obscure that most photography historians would struggle to name it. The appeal is in the archaeology — digging up the books that documented how photography was used, seen and circulated before anyone thought of those books as art objects in their own right.

Whether that niche proves sustainable as a publishing programme remains an open question. But Thoemmes has built and sustained specialised publishing ventures before, and his track record across both academic reprints and contemporary photobooks suggests he knows where the readers are, even when the rest of the market has not yet caught on.