We all know what’s in Carrie Bradshaw’s closet—a medley of Manolos, It bags, and at least one Vivienne Westwood wedding dress—but what about her bookshelf? Much like Sarah Jessica Parker herself— who recently launched her own publishing imprint, SJP Lit, with Zando Projects—Carrie is a devotee of print media, boasting a library heaving with tasteful literary fiction. There’s some Zadie Smith, some Colson Whitehead, and, in season two of And Just Like That…—the first two episodes of which premiered today on Max—titles like Dirtbag, Massachusetts by Isaac Fitzgerald and If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. (Carrie isn’t the only reader, either: Episode one of the new season sees Nya perusing Andrew Curran and Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s Who’s Black and Why? at a bar.)
Here, we catch up with property master Michael Cory about the books of AJLT, the library cart the crew wheeled around set, and the faux Vogues the prop department created because they couldn’t use real ones!
Vogue: How do you choose the books that are featured on the show?
Michael Cory: Ultimately, it comes down to the writers and Sarah Jessica Parker herself. The character of Carrie is a writer, so she wants to be very in that world. In season one, it was my first time working with [Parker], so we had a much larger conversation about it. She was interested in literary journals, particularly Irish ones, and more poetry. She gave us a couple of titles to go on, and we ran with that. She got more specific as it went on. She basically just texted me and my assistant lists of books. This season it wasn’t as specific; it was just, “Here are some cool publishers.”
What are some of the challenges in choosing books?
The hardest part is getting galleys when we don’t know the show’s release date. But another difficult thing, not for [the production department] so much as the legal department, is that we have to get permission not only from the authors but also the publishers for the artwork. We literally had hundreds of books, and we had to get every one of them cleared! If it didn’t clear, it just went into a pile of ones we weren’t able to use on the show. But if it’s just the spine, we don’t have to get it cleared. We go through the apartment and make sure every book is appropriate and not just a filler.
What else was different about this season?
We got to have fun this season. One of the characters buys a cookbook, so we were coming up with what cookbook [it would be] and what they are making. They’re supposed to be making a soufflé, and we found this great contemporary cookbook with a soufflé. The author was going to come in and make it, but they got COVID, so we actually brought in one of our accountants who had been a pastry chef at Nobu to fill in at the last second!
Only in New York!
[Laughs.] We also started [using] what was essentially a rolling library cart. So any time you see a book in Carrie’s purse or on her nightstand—there’s basically books present at all times—we’d roll out this library cart so we could see which felt appropriate for the scene at the time.
How has Carrie’s literary taste evolved?
There’s an episode in the [original show] when [Aleksandr Petrovsky] is reading poetry to Carrie and she says something to the effect of, “Vogue is my poetry.” Now she’s actually all about poetry and reading a lot more fiction and things like that. But there’s still magazines, which was a challenge for us because we weren’t allowed to use real magazines and in every episode there’s a big time jump, so it was basically asking our amazing art department any time they had a second of free time, “Can you please make me another magazine?”
But she’s maturing and becoming more of a [book] writer, not just a writer of a newspaper column. How many books has she written now? There were a bunch in the original series and a couple that came out after the movies that we don’t really make a big deal about, but we did design some new Carrie Bradshaw books and put them [on her shelf]. And this season she has a new book that’s coming out and there are some fictional authors we had to create books for that are kind of adjacent to her book.
Now for the lightning round. I’m going to name some books, and you can respond with the And Just Like That… character who would most likely read it: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
Miranda.
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Delila Harris.
Carrie.
Spare by Prince Harry.
We actually featured this book this season, with Nya. You’ll have to look for it, but it’s there!
Pageboy by Elliott Page.
Charlotte.
Let’s pretend she’s not a writer on the show: Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby.
Che. We had a bunch of Samantha Irby books in Che’s apartment in the first season—not on Samantha’s part; it was actually really hard to get permission.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.
Carrie.
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.
Charlotte. She has a bit of a mystery and true-crime bent in her house. Harry does as well, but he’s also reading a lot of finance books.
Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
It’s in Miranda’s house, but she has some disdain for it.
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.
I want to say Steve. When he was first introduced, he was actually pretty literary, and that part of him tends to get forgotten. [Editor’s note: Also Carrie? Take a closer look at the image above.]
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.