The Artist’s Bookshelf: On Reading, Art, and Belonging

I spend a lot of time with books. Reading them, collecting them, dreaming about them and more recently, selling them.

I have and always will love books. Finding the right book at the right time can change your entire life. Books are portals. I open one and transcend the boundaries of time and space, moving freely through territories I wouldn’t even dream of visiting otherwise. Reading is a moveable consciousness; it allows us to temporarily relinquish our own narrator to experience the reality of another. Who wouldn’t want to sharpen their empathy, expand their theory of mind, and live in other lands, eras, and genders as villains and heroes alike? Books possess us in this very unique way. Want to time travel? Pick up a book. Want to really blow your mind? Pick up a book about time travel.

We all come into the world as individuals, moving through life in these skin bags and circumstances we didn't choose, often convinced we are the only ones who feel the way we do. But books dissolve this illusion of separateness, creating a shared space where the boundaries between “me” and “them” start to blur. They don't just deepen empathy; they sharpen how we perceive the world.

I used to fear that my inner life marked me as an Other, but books changed that. There is something thrilling about finding your own secret confessions shared in the pages of someone you admire.

When people ask about my art education, I think of my bookshelves because that is where my real mentors came to life and didn’t just teach me to see, they taught me that how I see is what makes me an artist.

Maybe the more “artificial” our world becomes, the more we will want to remember that our most essential hardware is human and the future is analog. (By the way, if we are ever on a walk together and I slow down to check a Little Free Library? Apologies, but there might just be a Narnia closet inside, and I am not about to pass that by.)

Yes, books are magic.

It is not just the content inside that I adore, but books as objects. The weight, the smell, how their pages age, the thrill of reading forgotten marginalia. Books are the first thing I want to unpack in a new home, the first thing I want to visit when I’m traveling, the first place I go to when I am off the clock. I have escaped to the library when skipping lunch during high school, shelved books in a libraries, befriended my librarians and fellow booksellers. Guardians of books are underestimated but I’m not sure that they are under appreciated. I have a holy reverence for books so the people around them are and always will be my special crew. I’m lucky to be one of them.