Against Coffee Table Books

Why do we buy more books than we read?

Originally published in 2025 in Laguna~B’s online magazine as a series of six articles, Against Coffee Table Books positions itself as a clear, straightforward, and honest guide to navigating the complex world of contemporary publishing. Or rather, everything that orbits around books: from their formats and modes of display to how we collect them and the ways we read them. To explore these questions, Davide Tolfo and Federico Antonini turned to little-known and experimental sciences—the Readers’ Entomology, the Ethology of Bookshelves, among others—which allowed them to tackle philosophical and existential questions such as: why do we buy more books than we read?