A Bookshop Where Everything Is Recommended

On a recent Sunday afternoon, the journalist and editor Aaron Hicklin was standing among some still-empty shelves in his newly completed bookstore, One Grand, in a former mercantile building in the town of Narrowsburg, New York. In less than one week, he would open the doors to the shop, but at the moment he was still fretfully awaiting the final shipments of his stock. “I’ll be honest, I am really surprised by how many books you need to fill a space,” Hicklin said. “I have about a thousand in here, but you’d never know it. I’ve got to fill these damn shelves!”

This past summer, Hicklin, the editor-in-chief of Out magazine and the founder of the editorial agency Grand Editorial, debuted One Grand as a pop-up shop at the Whisper Editions bookshop in South Street Seaport. His concept was to present collections of volumes handpicked by various creatives — including Tilda Swinton, Michael Stipe, Lena Dunham and Edmund White — in response to the question, “If you were stranded on a desert island, which ten books could you not do without?”