Dave Eggers

Shakespeare and Company right near Notre Dame is... Those are old friends of mine.

That's the bookstore of my dreams and maybe everybody's.

That's sort of what we modeled our new international library of young authors on.

Like, just...

Bright colors and books everywhere and no hard edges and old wood and Persian rugs and cats and, you know, all of that stuff.

I really don't love the new wave of library design and stuff where it all looks like an airport.

You know, it's all like spare.

There's only screens.

You see a few books somewhere in the distance and then this vast expanse of sort of airport.

Looks like an Apple store.

Like an Apple store.

Yeah.

Not everything has to converge with tech.

The things that are apart from tech need to stay apart.

And I think there's always this mistake where libraries feel like, okay, we gotta be relevant.

We have to look like an Apple store.

And it's like, no, no, that's actually not why we go to the library.

We go because we want something really different and we want it to be screen-free and for most of it, we want it to be quiet.

We want it to be weird.

We want it to smell like paper and glue and leather.