At 180 Maiden Lane, high above Manhattan’s Financial District in New York City, sits Library180, a nonprofit reference library founded by Nikki Igol, an image researcher and archivist, and Steven Chaiken, co-founder at SN37, a creative agency representing visual artists with whom the Library launched in partnership with. Together, they have built an extraordinary archival resource that houses more than 3,000 rare and out-of-print publications spanning art, fashion, erotica, and subculture — an archive three decades in the making. Free to visit by appointment, the library has quickly become a magnet for artists, students, and creative teams seeking inspiration in the tactile world of print.

As someone who grew up in a world without the internet, I immediately felt a deep connection to what Steven and Nikki are building. For me, inspiration once meant spending entire days in libraries and archives, leafing through magazines and books, letting myself dive into images and texts with no interruptions, no algorithms steering my gaze. Those hours were voyages: I would lose myself in stories, surrender to fantasy, and sharpen my eye in ways that felt both intuitive and profound.

That is why Library180 resonates so deeply with me. What in my generation might have felt almost ordinary — the act of sitting at a table, flipping through pages, immersing in the totality of a magazine — today has become revolutionary. In a culture of infinite digital scrolling, Library180 reclaims the slowness, the materiality, the collaborative spirit of print. It reminds us that research can be an experience, not just a transaction of data.