Located in London’s De Beauvoir neighbourhood, Studio Nocturne is a ‘purveyor of spells, books and art objects,’ that has quickly become a gathering place for the city’s creatives. Its unique collection of rare first editions, artworks and ‘delightful, deviant publications,’ offers a new source of inspiration for the algorithm-weary, while its programme of events have included a book signing with the stylist Camille Bidault Waddington; a launch party for Tallulah Harlech’s skinwear brand Sylva; and an exhibition by Jenny McIlhatton, who transforms fashion waste into textile art.

Before launching Studio Nocturne, founder Flora Gau was a curator at the ALAÏA bookshop. The shop’s stock is informed by the same fashion and fine art sensibility, but combined with Gau’s penchant for the esoteric, unexpected and strange. ‘It feels very personal,’ she says. ‘It’s all my friends, people I know, things I love. That sense of community is really important to me. That’s why I wanted to keep the name studio. I don’t call it a shop or a gallery. For me, it’s a place to be inspired, a place where I also work and my artist friends use too.’

Below, she takes System through some of her favourite books in the space now.

This is a first edition from 1980; it’s so rare I never thought I’d have the chance to have it here. Kohei Yoshiyuki took these photographs throughout the 1970s in a park that was known as a spot for people to hook up, but also where people would go to watch them. So the book is a document of the lovers, as well as the Peeping Toms.

What I love about it is that because the photos were taken with an infrared camera, which gives the subjects this lightbeam quality, they almost look like angels. So it keeps the images from feeling creepy; they feel quite tender in a way.

This book was made in the 1980s by the Italian artist Maurizio Berlincioni. He spent a few months asking his friends to come sit on this couch, and then you can flip through either side of the book and pair them with different people.

It’s so clever. I really love having books like this here, so that every time people come here, they can discover new things. Because these types of things inspire me like crazy. I look at them and think, “Why hasn’t this been done before? Why does nobody know about this?”

This is a real cult object from 1984. It’s a flipbook that shows actress Nakamura writhing around on one side, and fingering her armpit on the page opposite, in a very inventive attempt to circumnavigate Japan’s censorship laws that ends up becoming something else completely.

This was Vol. 13 of the 44-volume ‘The Weekly Fluctuant Book’ series published by the Asahi Publishing Company in Tokyo. I asked my friend Paul Lawrence from November, who knows everything about books, if he could find out more about the publication, and he told me the other issues focused on totally different topics, things like baseball, nothing like this. Which, in my opinion, makes this even more strange and interesting.

I’ve had a few copies of these, and they’re always really popular. Terri King was a big astrologer in the 1970s, and this book is designed to help you find your perfect partner based on your astrological sign.

It’s filled with so many funny compatibility charts, illustrations and lists for each sign and their characteristics. But it’s also kind of problematic and outdated. For instance, I’m a Capricorn, and there is a section where she describes what a Capricorn woman looks like, and it’s just awful, like they have greasy hair and puffy faces. She was definitely wronged by a Capricorn in the past.

Lin was born in 2003 in Shenzhen but now lives in Brooklyn. Every copy of this book is different because it’s hand-ripped in a different place. It’s filled with photographs, illustrations, and found media created/collected over three months as when she was 20 years old and visiting Europe.

I think the book summary explains it best: ‘Good Night was the unexpected result of a repressed yearning to escape and belong, features remixed “poetry” from medicinal Chinese wine pamphlets found on the ground, post-club self-portraits taken in the shower, and London’s DIY scene, amongst reinterpreted subjects and fragments tracing back to childhood.’

This is one of my favourite books ever. Andree Putman was a French interior designer, a little older, very flashy and a bit over the top for her time. But she introduced a lot of important ideas.

People sometimes find this book a bit challenging; they don’t always respond to the aesthetic right away. But I love the 1980s decadence of her design, I think it has real personality.

Anna was having a show at Miłość Gallery down the street, and I went and bought two of these books. They immediately sold out, and when I got more, those immediately sold out as well.

I love her work and her sensibility. On the opening page the book is dedicated to ‘my great-grandmother, who single-handedly kept my family alive in Nazi-occupied Russia. She also taught me that it was unexpected for a woman to have one boyfriend at a time.’

She also loves cigarettes, which I think is great. There are cigarettes all over this book.

This is from 1988, and its publication coincided with a major retrospective of Mapplethorpe’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It’s filled with all these amazing Mapplethorpe photographs from the beginning of his career in the 1970s up until around the end of his career, as he died in 1989, a year after the exhibition took place. But what really makes it special is that Patti Smith has signed it on the page with a portrait he shot of her in 1978.

This is a zine edited by the Italian artist Alice Minervini. Its subtitle is ‘Deconstructing Fascist Imaginary on Sex, Love and Gender,’ and I love that it has this pink cover and kind of romantic title, and then you read the text on the bottom and realise it’s quite serious.

It’s meant to document a festival of the same name that took place in a former fascist building in Rimini, Italy, and includes essays and art from a bunch of contributors who think about how the fascist history in Italy and elsewhere has shaped the way we think about love, sex and gender.

We just got this in, and I’m so excited about it. It’s an anthology of queer and trans writing about water, which asks ten different artists to respond to water creatively, and they’ve created poems, drawings, and all kinds of things.

The contributors are Arlo Kean, Clara Davis, Elliot Waloschek, Finn Brown, Isabella Redmayne, Lizze Rose, Lucie Arnoux, So Mayer, Tadhg Haran, Tallulah Griffith, and Troy Cabida. I can tell you know it’s going to be the perfect mermaid read of the summer.