Essays

Five Years, Nineteen Books

Anthony · 6 min read · July 14, 2026

The first time Tempestt took me into a thrift store, I remember standing near the door the way you stand at the edge of a pool you're not sure you want to enter. I had grown up around books, but not around this — the particular patience of sifting through what other people had let go of, on the theory that some of it hadn't finished saying what it had to say. She went in like she was visiting an old friend. I went in like a man being introduced to a hobby he suspected he wouldn't have chosen for himself.

Five years ago this Bastille Day, I arrived in New York from France by way of Paris, Versailles, and London. I did not arrive with a plan to build a library. What I did, without much plan, was keep finding books. Not every French book that crossed my path — I only kept the ones that seemed to open something. Le Père Goriot, because it was the subject of a French exam I sat for so long ago that I am mildly astonished I still remember the argument I made about it. Simone Weil, because she is one of the few philosophers I return to without being assigned to. Le Petit Prince — Saint-Ex, as we call him at home — because a few hundred words, chosen with enough care, can outlast whatever billions of words are currently flooding a screen somewhere.

Some of what I found is genuinely old — a Henry James study of French letters from 1878, a Verne schoolbook from 1901, a Balzac from the same year. Some of it is stranger than old: a 1941 history of French aristocrats who fled the Revolution for the literal wilderness of upstate New York. And one piece isn't a book at all. It's a signed lithograph of two dancers, half Folies Bergère, half Lincoln Center — which is to say, it is the whole idea of this collection compressed into a single frame.

I did not set out to mark this anniversary with an inventory. But an inventory is more or less what five years of a certain kind of attention produces, if you let it. Every one of these books is a small, specific answer to a large, vague question — what does it mean to carry one country inside another one. I don't have a tidy answer. I have nineteen objects instead, which strikes me, on reflection, as the more honest form the answer could take.

We are offering the whole shelf today, on the day it was assembled to mark. Not because the collecting is finished — it isn't — but because five years felt like the right amount of time to stop quietly hoarding a bridge and start actually handing pieces of it across.

The full collection, and the story behind each piece, is here: Anniversary Finds.

Written alongside Capsule No. 01 · Anniversary Finds