Featured on the "Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books” Podcast
I was interviewed by Zibby Owens for a recent episode of her podcast “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books.” Our conversation touched on the magic of curated bookshelves, why e-readers will never replace printed books, and my book For the Love of Books and how I finally sat down to write it during my cancer treatment and recovery two years ago.
Below are some of the highlights of my interview with Zibby. It’s worth listening to in full — you can find it here — as Zibby’s passion for books and reading is made obvious by her thoughtful questions.
On Juniper Books’ business turning book covers into art:
“Anything that you can imagine with books, we can do it and put it across the covers. We can unleash this whole creative potential by putting books together — especially the books that you’ve read or want to read — and making them really special and artistic, [and] at the same time totally functional.”
On the significance of having a curated book collection in your home:
“It’s like DNA. It’s just completely unique, what’s on our shelves. We bring as much to the shelves as the books bring to us. It’s like alchemy or magic. We’re just creating something completely new that only exists right here.”
On why printed books will outlast e-readers:
“I was in the tech industry for seven years coming out of college before I started Juniper Books [and was] kind of burnt out on tech. I was sick of looking at screens. I needed to touch and hold things. I had a year in between the tech world and Juniper Books where I learned to make pottery and play flamenco guitar and did very immersive, single-focus tasks to rewire my brain. Books and reading and writing were ways I got back in touch with who I was and regained my attention span. I knew, even when everybody else was saying, “Didn’t you get the memo that e-books are on the rise and printed books aren’t going to exist?”, that I wasn’t alone. There were a lot of people who felt the way I did. When you get home, when you have a comfortable reading chair, you want to be surrounded by real books. You can’t re-create that feeling with e-books. The more I talked to [Juniper Books] customers in the earlier days, the more that resonated with them. I felt like I was onto something.”
On reorganizing your bookshelves:
“There’s a middle ground between keeping every book you’ve ever had and giving every book away: Does this mean something to me? Books are not like other objects — they can have a lot of meaning in a lot of different ways, and there’s a reason to keep them as a reflection of who you are and who you want to be.”
On writing For the Love of Books after being diagnosed with cancer:
“I had to stay home a lot and go to chemotherapy a lot. I’d always considered myself a writer, even though I’d never published anything, and I had this…extra time to rest and recover. I was like, ‘You know, when I emerge from this, I really want to publish books.’ One [idea] was a book about what I do, and I’d really had a lot of time to reflect on why I do it. I think it’s meaningful — I think encouraging people to read and surround themselves with books and have more books in the world is a noble purpose — but was I really doing enough to inspire people to do that? Was Juniper Books maybe too limited to the customers who had found us? Could I do something a little bit broader and encourage people to look at all the books they owned, even if they never bought a single thing from us? If they just reorganized the paperbacks they had on the shelf, I could provide insight about how to do that meaningfully…and give them permission to do what they want with their books, to read and slow down.”
Happy listening,
Thatcher