Fables of Faubus is a Paul Reas monograph published by GOST Books in 2018. The publisher describes it as a retrospective of thirty years of Reas’s documentary work, including previously unpublished pictures. The book is a 240-page paperback with essays by Stuart Cosgrove, David Chandler, Ken Grant, and Val Williams. Reas, who was raised in a working-class family in Bradford, has photographed the corporate and commercial reshaping of Britain: heritage attractions, retail parks, supermarkets, and other sites where leisure and shopping are packaged as experience. His approach is observational rather than indignant, with humour and sharp attention to the small compromises people make within the new economy.

The project brings together earlier and later work, allowing consistent concerns to emerge across different formats, commissions, and decades. The publisher presents it as a retrospective survey of Reas’s practice, and the accompanying essays frame that practice within British documentary photography. The book is modest in design and unsentimental in tone, suited to its subject.

For readers interested in British documentary photography and postwar social landscape work, the volume offers a sustained look at Reas’s career, including material that had not been published before. It is a useful reference for the period and themes it covers.