Picture Books

The way I feel about my books depends on the year, the season, or even the time of day. In the morning, when the sunlight from my windows hit them at just the right angle, they are, I must confess, objects of pure aesthetic value. Come night, they become more homely, inviting me to open their pages, pour myself a glass of wine and fall into a story. They are relics of my past, reminders of years when I hungered for Toni Morrison or James Baldwin’s advice, sought out Stuart Hall’s ideas or reveled in Valeria Luiselli’s prose. They have passed through the hands of friends it hurts to remember and lovers I try to forget. Before the world changed and people retreated indoors, I used to think the kinds of experiences my books held and the feelings they conjured within me could only happen IRL. But as I found myself more online, endlessly scrolling, faving, commenting, bookmarking, sharing, I began to encounter my books—the ones in my library, and then some—anew.

On Instagram, I found accounts that transformed books—community-oriented undertakings with a sharp curatorial bent. They are like For Keeps Books, a page showcasing the treasures of a Black bookstore and reading room of the same name in Atlanta; or investigations in antiquity and history like BLK MKT Vintage, which is dedicated to the Bedford-Stuyvesant-based brick and mortar store and e-commerce shop for Black ephemera; or they honor legacies like The Underground Bookstore, an account inspired by the artist Noah Davis’s library. These accounts conjure the rich and textured legacy of Black bookstores in the United States—an inquiry into language, aesthetics, history—and hold that responsibility close. They are extensions of the real, experiences unto themselves. They are where an artist’s mind meets a reader’s heart to create an encounter.

Rosa Duffy started For Keeps Books in 2018. She is an artist who has always loved books, both for their content and their materiality. As a teenager, Duffy scanned periodicals from her father’s library, like Soulbook, a Black Liberation journal published in the 1960s and 70s, and incorporated them into her art. Her father was a graduate of Morehouse College, and spent a majority of his life working for Black politicians in Atlanta, including Maynard Jackson, the city’s first Black mayor. Her grandmother, Josie Johnson, was a prominent civil rights activist in Minnesota. Duffy’s early encounters with Black literature coupled with her family’s legacy shaped her attitude as a collector. After high school, she moved to New York to study at the New School, and as a college student perused the city for hidden treasures, eventually amassing a sizable library. But she didn’t want her collection to be private: In interviews about her bookstore, Duffy continuously references her desire to share, to make public work usually relegated to the margins, to create a space where Black people can come and discover themselves anew.

The account is as much a curatorial endeavor as the physical bookstore and reading room is. During the height of the pandemic, its grid presented books, periodicals and merch against sharp white backgrounds, creating order and uniformity where there might not naturally be one. Within this construction, the greens, blacks, and brights red of archival gems announced themselves more forcefully. Scrolling through the posts, I imagined holding one of these texts in my hands, flipping through its pages, decoding creases and faint pencil marks. I thought about the spaces those books had seen, the ways they were consumed, the feelings they stirred.

For Keeps Books is an explicitly Black project, interested in excavation and celebration. One way to read Duffy’s work is as a mission to seek out and highlight books by Black authors because their words, sentences and experiments with language have been undervalued by predominantly white gatekeepers. But that feels lazy, and assumes a lot about the who and the why at the center. Books are memories and feelings. They are the wow. They are the why. On the For Keeps page, books are not announced but are dropped—limited edition status comes with the territory of the rare. Posts are unadorned and decontextualized. Instead of lengthy historical captions or takes, images are accompanied by short, cheeky phrases, as if to say: If you know, you know. I like to think of For Keeps as a love letter: to Black words, Black sentences, Black stories, Black writers and Black people.

It’s fitting that For Keeps and BLK MKT Vintage exist in the same here and now. BLK MKT also seduces, but the temptations are different: while For Keeps plays with an almost minimalist uniformity, BLK MKT Vintage cavorts with maximalism. The account’s posts burst with colors—bright reds and oranges, deep greens, and bold purples. In a recent post announcing their first drop of 2021, the bright red cover of Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s A Rap On Race sits next to Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, a signed black-and-white photo of Nikki Giovanni and a well-loved copy of Octavia Butler’s Kindred. The objects rest on a fabric whose teal color makes the books shine.

Kiyanna Stewart and Jannah Handy stumbled into what became BLK MKT Vintage. The couple started collecting vintage wares together after meeting as students at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Stewart, who grew up scavenging estate sales and antique shops with her mother, was a veteran, while Handy had reservations about collecting secondhand goods. All that changed eventually, and soon the pair started selling the items they collected at weekend flea markets around New York. Intention followed. Fueled by a desire to reach a more like-minded consumer base, Black people for whom these treasures would excite, resonate and tether to history, the couple moved their shop online.

BLK MKT Vintage has expanded significantly since its early days. Handy and Stewart now have a storefront in Brooklyn, where they both grew up, (although it is closed due to the coronavirus pandemic) and have brought their sharp eye and tastes to collaborations with shows like Insecure and Lovecraft Country. But the online community remains most charming, bringing together individuals who might not otherwise be drawn to one another. Here, visitors exchange stories, trade information and express enthusiasm for future drops. I look for Zora Neale Hurston among the offerings and find her in one post—the burnt orange, brown and blue covers of her books like Their Eyes Were Watching God, Voodoo Gods and Jonah’s Gourd Vine enlivened by a surrounding fall plant arrangement. In other posts, like one featuring photobooth snapshots from the 1920s to 1960s, visitors comment with memories of encounters with similar photographs in their own homes. “My grandmother has a picture like this from the 40s, easily my most prized possession,” says one. BLK MKT Vintage fosters reflection and nurtures sentimentality. Visitors bond over their mutual admiration for the treasures on display, but they also meditate on their relationship to the artifacts.

The personal and public interact in a similar way at The Underground Bookstore, an Instagram dedicated to the bookstore of the same name in Los Angeles. It’s an energetic extension of the gallery and community project Noah Davis opened before he died in 2015. “Noah was a bibliophile. He worked in bookstores and collected books,” the first post, uploaded last summer, reads. Unlike For Keeps or BLK MKT Vintage, The Underground Bookstore hasn’t always been online. They fulfilled their mission in person, with the bookstore as a nexus. “We’re now bringing our bookstore experience to you, wherever you are,” the first post proclaimed. “Together, let’s build a world.”

World-building happens organically on The Underground Bookstore page, which is largely run by the museum’s docents. They are shepherds, guiding readers from one recommendation to the next. Excerpted texts will turn into snapshots, will turn into paintings, will turn into videos. Occasionally, they hand the reins over to other people—like editors at The Believer, the literary magazine, or Veronica Camille Ratliff, the author of The Creative Black Woman’s Playbook. On The Underground that fluidity makes sense and mimics, I think, the kind of community the bookstore invited.

Whoever is in charge of the page also uses it as a moment to ask complicated questions or wrangle with their feelings about a certain text, like in one post about Alex Haley’s Roots. In a formal sense, the post acts like a review albeit less distanced. The author acknowledges the controversy around the text’s methodology and honestly grapples with the difficulty of the reading experience. But the point of the post seems to lie with its ultimate sentiment, a welcome invitation from one reader to another: “I invite you to wonder.”

Books are a wonder —objects that allow a person to explore variants of the same world or a totally different one. They encourage readers to experience a wide range of emotions, they ask for patience and understanding. They have always been my source of comfort, my cognitive refuge, an escape from the outlandish imaginings of my own mind. My relationship to books—apart from when I am paid to write about them—feels like a private act.

But things change, I guess. Prolonged isolation, it turns out, can transform activities you once loved into chores. Interacting with the books in my life became increasingly challenging as the days grew shorter and nights much longer. Although they granted me access to different worlds and offered distractions, I felt too anxious about crises in my own world to engage. Like anyone else, I missed hugging my family and laughing with my friends. But I also missed strangers, those folks I would encounter in a bookstore and bond over our shared interest in an author or a specific text. The more sentimental version of this story ends with a proclamation that perusing these Instagram pages fulfilled my longing for low-stakes casual encounters. If I am being honest, they are more akin to a private pleasure: a way of collecting stories I have always loved and cataloguing the ones I have yet to find.

Lovia Gyarkye is a writer based in New York.