The filmmaker John Waters once said that if you go home with a date and discover that they don’t own any books, you should not sleep with them. Be that as it may, what’s on someone’s shelf can be just as concerning and/or peculiar as the total absence of books. A bookshelf, like a bank account or a diary, is very revealing. For your ease, a quick gloss at a few archetypal shelves you might encounter in apartments inhabited by people under 40 in New York.
A single man who works in finance, but “just for now,” will probably have a handsome yet simple bookshelf from Soho Home. It will be stocked with the novels every guy who identifies as an intellectual claims to have read, including David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Don’t forget one book by a token female author, perhaps Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Instead of a traditional bookend, find a vintage cigar case to stop the books from toppling over.
The dilettante of considerable means displays vintage Pierre Chapo bookshelves, bought by one’s parents. The son will have Caro’s The Power Broker; Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, per the offhand recommendation of a French friend; and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The daughter fills the shelf with several of Le Labo’s largest candles, along with a few smaller ones from Jo Malone, Assouline’s Chanel book, and a set of Jane Austen’s novels.
The twenty- to thirtysomething female in a vaguely creative industry who wears Carel Paris Mary Janes and posts zoomed-in mirror selfies on Instagram has a bookshelf complete with Eve Babitz’s Slow Days Fast Company, Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior. The books will be broken up with irreverent vases, perhaps from Enzo Mari, and silly bookends, like these leggy ones from Il Corpo. The reading chair is certainly vintage Pierre Jeanneret.
Anyone who has graduated from Brown, Wesleyan, Kenyon, or Bard in the past decade will have copies of Tao Lin’s Taipei, Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi, and Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Ironic religious symbolism, perhaps in the form of a never-to-be-lit candle, will be on a Bauhaus-inspired shelf.
Last but not least there’s the self-proclaimed lefty in Brooklyn, with Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous proudly displayed on any bookshelf not purchased on Amazon. Don’t miss a pillow embroidered with a kitschy phrase, maybe A ROOM WITHOUT BOOKS IS LIKE A BODY WITHOUT A SOUL.
Jensen Davis is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
