An Interview With Alison Beshai of Resource Library

I’d heard Alison Beshai’s name a bunch of times from a various (Are.na-related) people before meeting her this summer while on a trip to New York. It was the day of the mayoral primaries, it was extremely hot; I took a bus to Ridgewood to meet Alison at the design store Lichen, where she was working at the time and where half of Resource Library is housed. We later went to a bookstore in the neighborhood, had a cold drink, and talked about how one goes about starting a lending library, as Alison had several years prior. After nearly three years at Lichen, she was about to go freelance and focus her time on growing Resource Library, which she’d recently registered as a non-profit. 

Resource Library is a library of design books. It’s also a lending library that’s not associated with any institution, which is not something you hear about often. While over the last seven years Resource has had iterations as a popup and a reading room, the collection is now split between locations at Lichen and the Herman Miller on Park, both of which can be visited during store hours. Anyone can browse the catalog, become a member, take out books. Soon, Resource will start offering a research fellowship to support an artist making work from the library’s database. Last month, Resource hosted Reading Hours at the Judd Foundation in New York.

Resource also has a robust Are.na presence and holds sessions where books are collectively scanned and then added to Are.na. Alison’s goal with Resource Library is ultimately to make design print more accessible, and I admire her commitment to building a system where resources are shared instead of sold. After our initial meeting in the summer, we had a video call and recorded the below conversation. 

Meg Miller: The first iteration of Resource Library was the popup you were running in DC, is that right?

Alison Beshai: Resource Library first started in 2018. During that time — full circle, actually — I was going through a job transition. I was really interested in design, but I didn't want to go back to school. I had a good paying job at the time, so I just started to buy a bunch of design books and do what I like to call an “independent study.” I was living in DC, but I was spending some time in New York. I was in New York when MoMA was having their moving sale, where I got a lot of books. I noticed that reading more about design and design theory, and thinking about the impact of design, had started to change the way that I think and how I process information and view the world.

I love to host at my apartment, and I would have friends come over and show them books that I had found. I was having all of these very organic social interactions around print. I started wondering, “how do other people do this?” There weren't a lot of design bookstores in DC at the time, though I'm sure that's changed. Design books are very expensive. I started to think about a place where people could interact with design print without having to buy it.

I pitched the idea of a “design library” to a developer in DC who's known for doing a lot of pop-ups in vacant spaces. They said they would give me the space, but that I’d need to get more money for the build out. So I found a fiscal and build out sponsor, the architecture firm Gensler, and in September of 2018 we opened a popup library at Union Market in DC. It was supposed to be a five week pop-up, but halfway through, the developer gave me some money so we could extend it to be a 10 week popup. It was always meant to be temporary, but the 10 weeks was a much better length for it than five would've been.

Meg: And when you moved to New York, you brought the library with you?

Alison: Well, the popup was a combination of donations that I received for the library — either from individuals or from publishers — and books loaned by the DC Public Library. In 2018 their Mies van der Rohe building was under construction and they had all these books sitting in storage that no one was going to touch for years. I got to go and pick out hundreds of books from their collection. The librarians were very excited that they were going to be out in people's hands.

Those books went back after the popup. The ones that were donated, I put into storage. When I officially moved to New York and packed up all my stuff in DC, I decided to bring some of the library’s books out of storage with me. I started talking to friends and friends-of-friends about doing another iteration of the library in New York, but this time I wanted it to be a lending library. With the popup, it was much more of a reading room in that you couldn’t take the books with you. I wanted to see people be able to interact with the books on a deeper level, and I also knew that there aren’t a lot of lending libraries that are independent. A friend of a friend, who is now a good friend, Eric [Mayes], was working at Lichen at the time and they had just opened up a second space. I brought up more books from storage, and we had somewhere between 100 and 150 books to start at Lichen at 98 Moore Street.

Later I would start working at Lichen, too, but at first I didn’t work there yet so I would kind of stop by to take care of it. And then some of the team, mostly Eric, collaborated with me on an inventory, membership, and lending log spreadsheet. When Lichen moved to Ridgewood, the library went with it. Slowly, we got more official shelving for it. We also received a big donation from Warby Parker, which refreshed the library with some newer print and also grew it — almost doubled it, to be honest. About a year after that, a friend of mine, Amanda Figueroa, who's a web developer, built a backend catalog and user system for me. 

Meg: Could you talk more about your decision to make Resource a lending library? I’m interested in this idea of an independent library, and of it being a very specific collection of books that you are making more accessible to people. There are design libraries, of course, but they’re mostly associated with universities, or at least that's how I've encountered them. Has it been the same for you?

Alison: Yeah, design libraries are usually affiliated with universities. Universities can be very institutionalized and exclusive in terms of who can access them and how. So that always comes back up with the library — it’s sort of an alternative learning method. The purpose of this space is also to have conversations about how design impacts our daily lives. I don't have a background in design. I think people like me who didn’t study design — and even people who do — think about design as architecture and furniture and graphic design. But social systems are designed, streets and sidewalks are designed. The food that we eat is designed. Everything, for better and for worse, comes out of a system that has been designed. So that’s something I’m interested in with the library — talking about what design is and what our relationship to it is. 

There are some folks who have reached out to me about the library specifically wanting to learn about the lending process. And the question that people always ask is “how do you make sure the books come back?” I think that’s people’s hesitation with starting a lending library. Something that’s helpful for Resource is that the library books are not mine. I have my own personal collection of design books, but these aren’t the library books. Almost all the library’s books were donated, and they were donated specifically for the purpose of going toward a library. They belong to the collection. 

So in terms of making it a lending library, I think there are two parts to it: If you lead with trust, people will feel trusted and want to live up to that. The other side is that things inherently go missing, and then you just have to figure out how you want to use membership dues or other ways to either replace that book or get a different one. Not leading with the fear of losing your books creates a better ecosystem, or it has for me so far. We've lost some books in the library for sure, but never to the point where it felt threatening.

Meg: Just curious, do Resource Library books have library cards? Or some sort of system for seeing who has checked the book out before you?

Alison: No, they have a stamp in them with our logo, but no library card. I had the idea of making a community book card or bookmark where people can leave notes about the book. Maybe this is physical or maybe it’s digital. Something like, “On page 52 in paragraph three, this statement made me think about this, or this inspired me and now I have this project,” or something — a conversation thread, almost like how Are.na blocks have a memory. I love the idea that the book could connect people, because the people who have borrowed the same book don't get to meet each other, they don’t know who had the book before them and after them. But more than just a name and a date, I’m interested in the dialogue that it could promote. So maybe that’s something I’ll come back to. 

Meg: So you started at Lichen with 150 books. And now the library is split across Lichen and Herman Miller on Park Ave. How many books do you have now?

Alison: In the catalog there are a little over 400, although I have around a hundred in the queue to add that I just don't have space for. 

Meg: The last time I saw you, you mentioned that Resource Library is now a 501(c)(3). Why did you decide to register as a non-profit?

Alison: I ultimately ended up doing it because I didn't want to have to sell books. Resource Library is a non-consumer project. What I’m trying to do through Resource is to further this idea that we can share things. We don't necessarily have to buy everything that we use. That's not a knock on buying books, because I buy books, sometimes every day [laughs]. I own a lot of books and I love to underline in my books and mark them up. But in thinking about this collection, the mission is to be a place where people can come and use something and give it back so someone else can use it. Especially something like these big design books that are expensive. 

I always say that Resource is a design library, but it's also proof of concept for an ecosystem. I very easily could have set up a system where I also sold the books that are in the library. I can’t tell you how many times people have asked to buy them. I probably could have helped fund the library that way. But I feel as if there are so many places to buy books and so many amazing booksellers, and I wanted to carve out something that was different. These things are not for sale. What happens when we think about more things that way? Who do we become when we share things?

Meg: I find that very resonant. You also seem to be good at finding support and fiscal sponsors to back the library. How did you learn how to do this?

Alison: I think I am admittedly one of the last extroverts that exists.

Meg: [laughs]

Alison: I do think that some of it is my nature and how I love talking to people. I love connecting the dots and that kind of thing. All of the partnerships that I've had have come out of organic relationships. I very rarely cold email. The people that I’m talking to are people that I either already have a relationship with or someone who has a relationship with someone I have a relationship with. That's just how I like to move as a person. Other people have had success with cold outreach, and so I don’t knock that at all. It’s just a personal preference. 

This is probably a good time to reveal that I have five Virgo placements [laughs]. One piece of advice I have is to think about where value can lie for a potential partner in partnering with you. When I went to the developer in DC it was because we needed a space for free. Naturally, you have to think about the other side — what’s the value for the developer? What do they want to see? A lot of the time it’s foot traffic. They want physical bodies in a space, especially in the digital world that we live in. Other times it's press, “cool factor,” or whatever. Sometimes you just need to ask them. 

For the fiscal and build out sponsor, Gensler was the architecture firm that we ended up working with. I had a personal contact there from a previous career. Gensler is one of the largest architecture firms in the world, but on their website they had something about being able to find design anywhere from a bottle of wine to the tallest building in the world, or something like that. I thought that was so interesting, because no one thinks about Gensler as working on that smaller scale. So I used that as an angle, that part of their mission is to do these smaller scale projects that are community-focused. Reading people's mission statements and seeing what they think they care about is a really good way to figure out if and how your values might align.

Meg: Resource Library has some very good Are.na channels, which are made up of scans from the collection that have been scanned by you and your community. Can you talk about the scanning sessions that you hold?

Alison: Scanning with the library first started as something I was doing for our Instagram. But the mission statement of Resource is making design knowledge more accessible. So how do we not just show people what's inside these books with the scans, but also let people have access to them? That’s why I started putting them on Are.na as well.

Our first Are.na channel was the “Catalog Scans” channel, which is still active. I have over a thousand blocks in there. On a weekly basis, I go to the library, take a book out, and scan the pages that I feel drawn to. But I'm always interested in challenging the idea that the library has to be through my lens. So I thought, what if I invited other people to come and do exactly what I’m doing and see what they pull?

I planned a scanning session that was open to the public that was focused around the collection. People could come to the library, pick out books, mark the pages that they wanted digitized, and I’d drop them the content and also upload it to the Are.na channel. I wanted to see how others would approach this practice, but it also turned into a kind of archive of what people were picking up at the library. What did they want digitized? So many people came, and I was really excited to see that other people were as interested in doing this as I am.

Meg: What are some other things coming up for Resource Library? I remember you saying something about an archive, and specifically thinking about the work of Black and POC designers. 

Alison: The archive isn't public yet but I'm currently building out collections for it. I think that it's possible the next iteration of Resource will be Resource Library and Archive. The type of materials that I’m interested in and have started to archive are related to the design process. What has become super obvious to me as I’ve collected design books — and I think to anyone who looks at it closely — is that most of these books are by and about white Western practitioners. My natural response to that is to try to fill that gap. I’m not a bookmaker, so my particular avenue isn’t going to be to make design books. But I’m interested in process and I’m interested in working with memory. To have a library and an archive is to inherently be thinking about memory, how we remember things now, and how people will remember things in the future.

Up until recently I worked at Lichen. I started scanning things at Lichen without even really thinking about it as an archive, I was just scanning things that I knew were ephemeral and original. Things like design sketches, cards that people mail to Ed [Be] and Jared [Blake, Lichen co-founders], a paper invite. After a certain point, I realized that this is how archives start: through a specific point of view and through a person who’s willing to catalog. I have no background in archiving, but I don’t have a library science degree either. All of my initiatives are self-initiated. I started thinking that it would be really interesting to see material from other designers whose studios I don’t work at [laughs]. The founders of Lichen are Black and POC, and that sort of started the idea for a digital archive that is focused on living Black and POC designers and their processes. 

The reason I focus on living designers is because I want to add an oral history component to it where the people provide context. A drawing of a table that never got produced at Lichen could be conceived in different ways, but if there's a recording of Jared saying, “This was from the collaboration we were doing with Muji and we got rid of this one because it didn't align with XYZ” — that adds context. I think one of the reasons that there aren’t as many books on Black and POC design history is that for a long time, oral history was how people of those communities passed down knowledge and information. So that’s something to consider in this practice as well.

And then on the library side, I’d love to start including more books on some topics that people don’t typically think of as design. For example, I would love to build out a social design section of the library and also build out music and food, maybe nature as well. These are just some ideas about how we can push what we should consider design and what types of books should be in the collection.