On the 26th floor, Library180 at a WSA building in the Financial District.
Photo: Courtesy Library 180
Plenty has been written about New York City’s resurgence in genre bookshops — there’s Love and Legends in Prospect Heights for fantasy, the Twisted Spine in Williamsburg for horror, and children’s-lit-focused Spiral Books in Soho and Words on Warren in Tribeca. But this year also saw a wave of new niche libraries dedicated to architecture, fashion, graphic design, and interiors, where the pleasure of looking is the point. Often without street-facing signage and tucked inside an office building, at the back of a store, and even in someone’s home, these libraries promote themselves through Instagram rather than window displays. But it’s precisely their if-you-know-you-know setups that add to their appeal, especially for anyone seeking out-of-print, rare, and hard-to-source material. And despite the rarity of the collections, none of these libraries are stuffy or formal — you won’t have to keep your voice down, although you might need to schedule an appointment.
From left: Photo: Bianca Jenkins/Courtesy Resource LibraryPhoto: Alison Beshai/Courtesy Resource Library
From top: Photo: Bianca Jenkins/Courtesy Resource LibraryPhoto: Alison Beshai/Courtesy Resource Library
Alison Beshai yearned for an outlet where design education didn’t have to be cost prohibitive or require a degree. So she launched Resource Library, a nonprofit lending library filled with books that would appeal to professionals in fields like graphic design and architecture. A monthly fee of $5 grants access to check out books for 30 days from a catalogue of more than 400 titles — from Design to Live: Everyday Inventions From a Refugee Camp to Landscape of Faith: Architectural Interventions Along the Mexican Pilgrimage Route — with two pickup and return locations: Lichen, a home goods shop in Ridgewood (where Beshai previously worked and where she helped produce the store’s book, Our Floors Are Uneven), and Herman Miller’s storefront in Gramercy; the books are held between both locations. Lichen, 5-64 Woodward Avenue, Ridgewood; Herman Miller Store, 251 Park Avenue South
The room dedicated to smut books and periodicals at Library180
Photo: Courtesy Library 180
From left: Photo: Courtesy of Library 180Photo: Courtesy Library 180
From top: Photo: Courtesy of Library 180Photo: Courtesy Library 180
Library180, located on the 26th floor of an office building that is part of WSA’s Fidi mini-empire, has gotten a little more press than some of the others here, but it still manages to be a relatively private haven for serious magazine nerds. It holds an archive of nearly 3,000 magazines and books from the heyday of print magazines, most from the personal collection of Nikki Igol. She and co-founder Steven Chaiken were colleagues at V; the collection is wide-ranging and reflective of Igol’s interests, including not just fashion advertising but also harder-to-find printed matter on subcultures like ravers and prepsters. There are old copies of gossip columnist George Wayne’s zine, R.O.M.E., and an art book about the defunct nightclub Area (currently listed on eBay for $3,000). A second room, dedicated to smut, has out-of-print copies of Screw magazine. Despite the rarity of many of the titles, “we are not precious,” says Igol; no gloves are required for visitors — who have included clothing designers and magazine staffs on field trips. But you can’t take anything home with you. 180 Maiden Lane, Floor 26
Photo: Courtesy Odd Eye/Apple Photos Clean Up
The most intimate new library is inside the Greenpoint home of Taylor Fimbrez, which is available to browse by appointment. It’s designed with the same Fiorucci feeling as his interiors shop Odd Eye, which previously had an East Village storefront but now sells entirely online, with items like a 1979 “Cocaine Calendar,” an inflatable fruit bowl, and a limited-run Alessi tea kettle. Beyond the items for sale in his house, there are around 500 not-for-sale design and art titles neatly stored in a row of bookshelves— “enough to piss off the movers,” says Fimbrez — including the complete catalogue of interior design magazine Nest and a book on the British airbrush artist Philip Castle, known for his poster for A Clockwork Orange. Fimbrez has also created a dedicated reading area nearby — a vintage Artek Alto black table with stools — that channels some of the in-person energy of the old store. Spend a few hours there flipping through; a scanner is also available to take some of it home with you. For address and appointment, reach out via Odd Eye’s Instagram.
Photo: Connor Rancan
From left: Photo: Connor RancanPhoto: Connor Rancan
From top: Photo: Connor RancanPhoto: Connor Rancan
The Bowery store of Japanese streetwear brand Vowels may look like other downtown menswear boutiques — spare, industrial, with minimalist displays and raw concrete everywhere. However, in the back of the shop, the company has installed something a little less expected than a barbershop or listening lounge; it’s a library stationed in a hallway. But the books and magazines are not organized on shelves or displayed, covers out, like lifestyle props; instead, they’re hung like laundry inside a custom 60-foot-long display case. For the most part, the resource library is centered on Japanese ephemera, more focused on design than fashion — there are books on typography, photography, textiles, and ceramics along with architecture magazines, museum-exhibition catalogues, and advertising manuals. All of it is from the personal collection of creative director Yuki Yagi and curated by Vowels’s in-house archivist, Bergen Hendrickson (how many stores can say they have one!). There are hard-to-find back issues of Japanese magazines like Studio Voice, Brutus, and Olive and some photography monthlies dating back as far as the 1920s. Hendrickson says some of the rarer items that draw people in are books by Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki. The library is available by appointment, and given that the collection on display rotates roughly every six weeks (often timed with related events or seasonal launches), there are plenty of reasons to come back and visit. A scanner is available as well, and a colorful velvet-padded stadium-seating lounge in the back provides plenty of room to linger over first editions with complimentary La Cabra coffee and tea from the store’s café. Vowels, 76 Bowery