The shop has a bookshelf now. Twelve things sit on it: five books we would keep on our own coffee table, a set of Accidentally Wes Anderson postcards, a thousand-piece puzzle, a kit for people who lend books out and would like them back, and four objects that each came out of a book.
A page from Cabin Porn, photographed on our desk. Most of the shelf looks like this up close.
The rule for the Reading Room is the one that governs everything else here: if we would not put it in an article, it does not go in the store. Books turned out to be the easiest category we have ever chosen, because a good book is a Moss & Fog post that keeps going for 300 pages.
There is one thing on this shelf you cannot buy. Every book that leaves the studio goes out with a Moss & Fog bookmark tucked inside the cover: two inches by seven, printed in the same letterpress style as our pack lists and field studies, in a limited edition of 250 that we number by hand. The front carries a small riso treeline and the only reading advice we have ever felt qualified to give. The back is a miniature library checkout card, so when you lend the book out, and you should, you have a record of who has it. When the 250 are gone, they are gone.
The Healing Nature of Trees and Modern Psychedelics, stacked in the studio.
The four objects are the newest things on the shelf, and they are sitting with the books for a reason. The Watercolour Swatches Memory Game takes its colours from a treatise a Dutch artist hand-painted across roughly 800 pages in 1692, some 271 years before Pantone arrived at the same idea. The Outdoors Oracle arrives with a 220-page journal that ties every card back to a longer story. The National Parks Coloring Book comes from the certified B Corp that funds conservation work in the parks. And the Short Story Fragrance Sampler is made by a Portland perfume house that writes the novel first and credits every scent to an author who does not exist.
We add to this shelf a few titles at a time rather than all at once, so it is worth looking back every so often.