In December, in a New York Burger King, leftfield publishing house Dream Baby Press staged the latest edition of its Perverted Book Club, featuring erotica readings from a curated list of notable orators. They included stylist and Interview Magazine editor-in-chief Mel Ottenberg, actor Lukas Gage, and i-D senior editor Nicolaia Rips, who read sexy fiction to 400 guests, crammed in an upstairs room.
The event, organized by Dream Baby Press founder Zack Roif and Matt Starr, is one of many literary clubs popping up across the globe, from roaming Heavy Traffic magazine reading events, to London’s Soho Reading Series. It’s testament to a growing interest in literature, as an antidote to internet saturation and AI slop.
“The rise of bookishness and reading is a direct response to the hectic speed of modern society,” says author, culture journalist and Miu Miu Literary Club moderator Zing Tsjeng. “Because culture has been dominated by AI slop, second-screen viewing, and frictionless food and product delivery apps, the new way to signal elevated taste is to show that you understand challenging cultural ephemera, like books,” echoes editor and writer Trey Taylor.
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Demonstrating this understanding is giving rise to two adjacent trends. On the one hand, there’s ‘poetcore’, a key trend for the Fall/Winter 2026 season, featuring romantic and historical silhouettes and fabrics, as consumers take style inspiration from their favorite reads. Then, there’s the proliferation of book merch. Book shops like Climax and Idea are selling bags, T-shirts, caps and keyrings, and becoming fashion labels in their own right, as fans clamber to demonstrate they’ve walked through the door. “Climax’s Isabella Burley and Idea’s Angela Hill and David Owen were way ahead of this trend, curating books and other objects that were aligned with their own tastes, which have more recently begun to resonate with the fashion crowd,” Taylor says.
Luxury labels are taking note. The new Dior Book Tote features designs inspired by classic novels, while its Selfridges pop-up is currently allowing customers to add their initials to bookmarks and notebooks. Coach now sells miniature book charms, as recently read on the subway by Elle Fanning. Miu Miu, meanwhile, has made reading a core part of its identity via its Literary Club. Despite their best efforts, though, it’s the more niche, IYKYK bookstores and clubs that are grabbing fashion fans.
Former editor-in-chief of Dazed and CMO of Acne Studios Burley founded online bookstore Climax in 2020. She’s since opened two bricks-and-mortar stores in London (2023) and New York (2025), where misted glass doors reveal a coolly sparse selection of literary ephemera, retro mags and arty monographs. Hanging alongside the covetable tomes: a rail of handmade latex bags and hot pink baby tees. It’s become an oasis for both It-girls and lit-girls. “The scope of our world and our universe feels totally limitless,” she says. Its popularity is evidenced by the scores of customers sporting Climax merch on London and New York streets.
Burley has always wanted Climax’s apparel to be as covetable as its books. Preferring the term “wearables” to merch, she explains that she waited four years to introduce these pieces, building a Climax world before collaborating with Chopova Lowena on a loved-up capsule. “It was really important for me to do it properly,” Burley says. “It would have been the easiest business decision to slap Climax over a blank T-shirt from day one, but I’m so glad we didn’t,” she continues, gesturing toward a new metallic bookmark produced with tableware label Gohar World. Burley also teases a footwear collaboration coming out at the end of the year.
Dream Baby Press’s Starr is equally curatorial. “I make very little merch. I really don’t want to make things just to make them, or do any cash grabs, which is what most merch is,” he says. “I really only want to make pieces in limited batches that you can get at our events.”
Quality is as crucial as scarcity; Burley wants her book merch to be treasured, not thrown away. The cut-and-sewn T-shirts are crafted from organic cotton and produced in Portugal, while the crop of upcoming baby tees is inspired by an old Japanese band T-shirt Burley personally thrifted. “It’s an added luxury detail that’s really thoughtful and considered,” she says.
The origin story
Book merch wasn’t always so intentional. The story of contemporary book merch begins with Daunt Books, an Edwardian bookshop with three stores in London. In 2006, Daunt began to introduce a cheap canvas tote, printed with an illustration of the shop. It accidentally became an iconic staple of the literati, selling thousands across the world in the process. “As much as I love to hate on them, I have to give props to the humble bookshop tote — without it, none of this would have happened,” says Tsjeng.
Daunt’s low-price bestseller tote was a lightbulb moment for rare book boutique Idea. Co-founder David Owen initially had the idea to slap “Birkin” on a tote bag, but opted for “Winona” instead, inspired by Winona Ryder. He produced an initial run of 25 shirts for the opening of Dover Street Market in New York, but has sold 15,000 units to date. “If you went to Paris for fashion week [in 2016] and you were in Eurostar departures, between bags and shirts and hats saying ‘Winona’, you could probably count on seeing about eight,” says Owen.
The merch has since grown into a range of spellout pieces that typifies Idea’s idiosyncratic use of language. Its signature offering is a playful statement — like “Fatty Tuna”, or “Expensive Taste”, or “I Don’t Work Here” — worn by those with chutzpah. “People who wear them have to be a certain type of person, and only a certain percentage want to be spoken to. You try wearing a ‘New Dad’ hat and not being involved in a conversation every five minutes,” jokes Owen. Idea’s logo can only be found at the back, playing on an IYKYK vibe and solely recognizable through a signature serif font. “It’s the same underlying enthusiasm for seeing something or thinking of something and wanting to share it.”
Unlike Idea, Burley is game to play with the Climax logo, emblazoning it on calligraphic tees and neon scarves. But she is still resisting the pull of the tote. “A bookstore without a tote, it’s kind of criminal not to, but we still don’t. We have handmade latex bags [instead],” she says. The nuanced approach of both Climax and Idea acts as a divider between the book business and its merch arm. There’s an audience cross-pollination, but they also attract dedicated customer bases. “Tons of people don’t know we publish books. In Korea, we’re just a brand that really only makes T-shirts and sweatshirts and hats and bags,” says Owen.
This subjective approach allows customers to flaunt their discerning tastes. “Book merch, especially something that goes beyond the customary tote bag, screams: I’m literary and intellectual,” says Tsjeng. “They signal something about the wearer’s taste and status that is also slightly elusive — unlike carrying around an actual book, or wearing a T-shirt with a film title on it, you can’t really tell exactly what someone in a Climax hoodie is watching or reading.”
Owen says that Idea’s revenue is exactly split into thirds: book sales, in-house publications, and merchandise. “During a two-month spell where we don’t have any massively exciting new book that we’re publishing, it is kind of handy to easily design a load more hats,” says Owen. But don’t think for a moment that Idea’s slogans are easy to churn out. “It doesn’t mean we can design them at the drop of a hat.”
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Literary symbolism
The fashion-bookstore crossover is a two-way street. On one side, brands can tap into the intellectual value of reading. Owen recalls selling books to Paul Smith stores to exude a sense of worldly luxury. The titles mattered. “If you put five Harry Potter paperbacks next to a £350 shirt, I suspect you wouldn’t sell it,” he laughs. It also provides a unique mood board for labels. “Designers go to places like Paul Lawrence’s November Books in Covent Garden, Reference Point at 180 Strand, and the recently opened Library180 in New York’s WSA building,” Taylor says.
On the flipside, book stores increase their style clout through fashion collaborations. “It’s a perfect symbiotic relationship, right? Brands get to ride off the cultural capital of books while indie booksellers get to shift more books and make a bit of cash on the side,” says Tsjeng. Increasingly, bookstores’ bricks-and-mortar outposts are becoming spaces for these crossovers. Climax, for example, has recently hosted events in its New York and London branches for pimple patch brand Starface and Marc Jacobs’s Heaven label. “We have so many brands wanting to do projects in this space,” Burley says. “We offer a kind of cultural context for things to exist in.”
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For the customer, Owen says, it’s ultimately about sex appeal. “People think that an association with books and independent bookstores is something that makes them more likely to get a boyfriend or a girlfriend,” he says. Starr echoes this: “Books are sexy and people want to feel sexy and appear sexy, so it’s sexy to signal to the world that you like books. I personally would rather look at book merch than almost any other type of merch.”
Plus, while it’s no mean feat to lug around a Nadia Cohen monograph on the Tube, book merch can act as an identity marker. In this sense, it could be filed next to the movie merch moment off the back of indie film studio A24. But wearing a Climax tee is closer to wearing an A24 hoodie, rather than a Marty Supreme one — it’s more alluringly mysterious.
All this recontextualization of book merch risks straying into the territory of performative reading, or wearing a tee from a band you have never listened to. Owen notes that Idea has sold 20,000 “Collier” caps in Seoul after a K-pop star was spotted in one, but no one seems to know that it refers to cult photographer Collier Schorr (Owen still forwards all the Instagram images to her). But, letting the wearer decipher the meaning is the key to creating enduring apparel. “You let people interpret. If you’re too didactic about it — ‘this is a bookshop’ — you’re limiting it,” Owen says.
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Also, demonstrating a love of reading can only be a good thing. “We need more readers. On balance, I probably don’t care if some of them do it, because they like posing with it on their Instagram grid,” says Tsjeng.
A story from Burley proves the power of book merch. Recently, she says, British Vogue contributing editor Olivia Singer stuck a hot pink Climax bumper sticker — “Honk if you like books!” — on the back of her car. Admiring motorists, Burley was told, couldn’t stop responding with a chorus of honks. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it worked.’”
