On the heels of NYFW coming to an end, the coolest event to be spotted at was the Available Works book fair at WSA in FiDi. Never in my life had I attended an event where books were priced above $200 and people were actually buying them. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in a herd of like-minded women when I showed up at DAE in Brooklyn on one of the last warm weekends in October for Seen Library’s mini pop-up event. The idea for the project started as an exercise of going on a blind date with a book written by a BIPOC, woman, or queer author, but what founder Jordan Santos has quietly built is a safe and inclusive space for a diverse community of readers to connect in real life. “It’s not about whether [a book] is trending or on some best seller or new release list—it’s about what one needs or is interested in at the moment,” she writes in an email.
Over the past three years, Seen Library has evolved from a book-themed mood board on Instagram to a fully fledged brand that hosts quarterly book exchanges, dinner parties, reading rooms, meetups, and book drives. “Every single gathering is so special and unique but I think the most valuable takeaway is that at each one, complete strangers are so eager (even if shy at first!) to come into a new space, with such openness and curiosity and vulnerability, and be able to share something about themselves with people they don’t know,” Santos explains. “Another takeaway is how much easier we are able to find commonality amongst one another when we have something like a book to help us find it.” She views this collective craving for reading as a desire to “slow down and savor the present,” noting how it also serves as “an intentional practice that requires sitting in one place and focusing on one thing.”
Don’t overlook the shelves
Even if you’re not a big reader, it’s sort of implied that you maintain the illusion of a person who opens a book every once in a while. During Ashley Tisdale’s episode of Open Door, the actor turned designer admitted to tasking her husband with buying extra books to fill the shelves in their living room at the last minute. “Let’s clear this up. There are some of my books from over the years in there but yea 36 shelves that hold 22 books I did not have and any interior designer would have done the same. They do it all the time, I was just honest about it,” she tweeted in response to the backlash.
Over the decades, certain coffee table books have become their own status symbols (including Architectural Digest at 100: A Century of Style), serving as signifiers of taste. During the aughts, Alexa Chung’s It book was practically the bible for millennials trying to channel their inner style icon. But in terms of styling her own coffee table, Chung recently told AD that nowadays she doesn’t pay it any mind. Inside the fashion designer’s London home, you can find an assortment of books that her boyfriend, Tom Sturridge, has read on the shelves (which she describes as “insane”). Much to her dismay, he refuses to arrange the books by height and she’s “not allowed to touch them.”
