Shelf Isolation
In times of disruption, people find their lifestyles altered. We wanted to address an aspect that was particularly positive, and that could be encouraged to take up in the future but in a more agreeable manner. The lockdown implored us to turn the spotlight inward and spend time with ourselves. With a constrained environment and schedule, books gained relevance and popularity among masses in ways different from before. We asked thirty friends of ours about their reading habits, and uncovered the fact that while genre, spectrum of variety and knowledge, and trade off between books and chores vary, the unanimous consensus of spending more time reading was hard to ignore. By the means of redesigned book covers, we reassert the place of reading in society when bookstores and libraries are nearly inaccessible. The way people consumed information and media changed, and this is a documentation by the very means of this change. The humour in book covers as posters is intended to reaffirm people’s faith in reading that they discovered during the lockdown even after the pandemic ends, a reminder of the times when we turned to artists when we had nothing else at hand, and an appreciation of the shared spaces and bookstores, and the associated charm of exploring the world while travelling pages. Our friends who had responded to questions around reading habits appreciated the posters as reminders of unanticipated times and some good that we could muster out of it. Conversations around books like those in libraries and reading circles are absent at the moment for a large proportion of population, and we hope that this changes in the days to come, without changing the fact that the reading diaspora keeps exploding.