A tour of Peter Mendelsund’s personal library

NEW YORK — A few years ago, Peter Mendelsund lost the desire to read.

It was an unnerving development in a life spent making books. Before he became creative director at the Atlantic, Mendelsund had been the associate art director at the publisher Knopf. He designed some of this century’s most arresting book covers, for contemporary authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro and Emma Cline, as well as new editions of works by James Joyce, Franz Kafka, W.G. Sebald and others. They numbered in the hundreds; he once said he spent all his waking hours poring over manuscripts.

Perhaps pleasure reading had come to seem like a busman’s holiday? “I didn’t used to feel that way,” Mendelsund said during a recent visit to his home in Manhattan. “It’s a very strange thing. I think it’s a combination of reading so much during my life and then working in the industry for a while and just seeing the churn.”

During the pandemic, depressed, “I read Proust for the first time, the whole shebang, and then I finished it, and I just sort of felt — done.”

And it wasn’t just that “In Search of Lost Time” felt so perfect and complete, or that it was such a long undertaking. “I just couldn’t pick anything up anymore.”

Still, despite his diminished appetite for prose, Mendelsund’s sizable apartment remains awash in books. “The piles are eventually — I think — going to be something. I don’t know what. I have to make some order,” he said. He distributed cups of coffee, then showed us around.

A piano built in 1900 by Mason & Hamlin anchors one room. “It’s falling apart, but it’s the one object that’s followed me through my life, and I absolutely adore it.” He still plays from many of the musical scores from his childhood — Beethoven sonatas, Bach fugues — their pages covered in a palimpsest of penciled notes from various teachers. (DRAMA!, one demands.)

“As soon as everyone’s gone,” he said, indicating the instrument’s bench, “this is where I go.”

Growing up, he considered himself the least visual member of his family; his father and sister were painters, and his mother was an art historian. Mendelsund took a different path, becoming a concert pianist, then a designer, then a novelist. “There was sort of no room for me there [in fine arts], and it was fine. Like I say in the book [his new memoir, “Exhibitionist”] — and it’s true — I’ve never looked at a painting and cried. I’ve never felt seriously moved by a piece of visual art. Whereas I’ve definitely broken down in tears reading something, and for sure while playing music.”

But a few years ago, during that period of deep depression, he surprised himself by taking up painting. His new memoir, “Exhibitionist,” collects his journal entries and more than 100 artworks produced over that period. This month also brings the publication of his third novel, “Weepers,” about a band of professional mourners.

In his mind, his pursuits fall into a definite hierarchy: music (“the most important thing I can do”), then writing (“the second most direct and expressive thing for me”), followed by painting and then design.

“Design’s an interesting thing,” Mendelsund said. “You can make things that are pretty, and you can make things that are clever, but the emotional bandwidth is pretty small.”

“I remember designing that Simone de Beauvoir,” he said, indicating his cover for “The Woman Destroyed”; this version takes the form of an embroidered couture clutch made by Olympia Le-Tan. “[The publisher was] like, ‘It’s hideous,’ and I was like, ‘But it won’t be.’ That’s the thing about beauty, right? In terms of the zeitgeist, you always have to be thinking, what will be beautiful? But you can’t really do ugly.”

The purse is one of several displayed on his “whatever” shelves, long and black, running along one long wall. He rearranges the objects on them when the mood strikes, like a retailer deciding what to put out on the sales floor. “I’ve always loved houses that look like stores and stores that look like houses,” he said. “I do not know what that is, but it is a thing for me.” Many of the volumes, naturally, stand with their covers facing out.

“This is a book I adore,” he said, grabbing one. He stopped midsentence and laughed. “Actually,” he said, registering the lightness of the box in his hand, “it’s just the case.” The book itself, an early collection of Zen parables in translation, was in another room. It’s part of his considerable collection of Buddhist texts, one he consults often.

“It’s been useful to turn to some of that stuff during the dark periods,” he said, though he doesn’t really think of himself as sitting down and reading it. “The parables are so great because they’re like haiku. They’re so short — but the condensation of meaning — they remind you, a little bit, that you may want to die. On the other hand, it’s just what’s happening right now in front of you: Here you are, and here’s this beautiful plant. Here’s these colors,” he said. “So I find them valuable, just kind of like SSRIs.”

These shelves hold some Mendelsund-designed titles, alongside books by some favorite designers, including Alvin Lustig and Milton Glaser. “I bought this on Alibris for nothing,” he said, picking up a volume designed by Paul Rand. “There’s actually nothing in this apartment that’s worth a lot of money. I’m also very not fussy about the way these things are kept.”

We kept stumbling onto all kinds of treasures: a ceramic coffee lid made by his friend Leanne Shapton; a Picasso vessel “with severe damage” on the back; a canvas that he found in his mother’s closet after her death in November. “But then I turned it over, and it’s a Bonnard! It was just, like, insane.”

Her art books are also here. And her collected hippo figures are everywhere. (“She was a very demure woman, but for some reason, that was her animal.”)

A glass-topped coffee table, Mendelsund’s “wunderkammer,” holds some of the most prized books in his collection. Alongside rare works by Henri Matisse and Robert Rauschenberg, there’s a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” with a cover by Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell. “It is very, very dear to me,” Mendelsund said. This copy came to him from his mother, who had it from her mother.

Next to it was a first edition of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which Mendelsund, a fan, found for $300 at an estate sale. He identified it via a printer’s mark in the penultimate chapter, right before Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. Mendelsund’s young children were with him at the time, “and I just said, ‘Girls, be cool,’” he remembered. “I’ve never run a credit card faster.”

Eventually, we got to the piles on the floor: “the stuff that I’ve been reading when I do read.” Mendelsund no longer consumes any new literary fiction, he said. Sometimes science fiction and fantasy. Mostly, when he can get himself to read, he reads critical theory and philosophy. Nearby, other shelves hold old favorites: “Derrida and all that sort of stuff from a past life,” Wittgenstein, Hegel, Heidegger, Barthes.

“You can see the degree to which I love this book,” he said, pulling out his copy of “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon. “It’s absolutely destroyed.” He picked up his copy when he was abroad, in 1990. “You didn’t have the internet, so there was no way to look up the mathematics or the engineering or the weird cultural references or the stuff that was in Greek. So I read it with a friend of mine in Paris when I was living there, and I loved it, but I only got so much out of it. And then I reread it three or four years ago, and it was such a different experience, because I could really understand page by page what was happening.”

What else? “This is a really interesting book that I read in high school. Do you know Romain Rolland? Nobody does! So he wrote this book, ‘Jean-Christophe,’ in the early part of the 20th century and won the Nobel Prize. Totally forgotten. This guy was like, I don’t know what the equivalent is, the Sally Rooney, the Jonathan Franzen — everybody read this book,” he said. Today, though: “I am literally probably the only person on earth who’s read this book.”

Nearby was Mendelsund’s father’s copy of “Moby-Dick,” surprisingly slim. “This was one of his favorite books — and actually, it’s very hard to read from just an optical point of view. But I’ve read this so many times, and I always read this edition, and I try to take very good care of it,” he said. “He was in the merchant marines when he was, like, 18. So he’s been to sea — that has something to do with it. I think the other part is just that it’s a transcendentally great book.”

He sort of wishes his dad, who died when Mendelsund was still at conservatory, were around to see this: the paintings piling up in one of the back bedrooms, one even fashioned from some sheetrock found on the street. (Canvas is expensive, he explained.) “I mean, he would just have been shocked,” Mendelsund said.

Who knows what unexpected directions life might take next? “I’m in this very strange liminal space, where I mean — I wonder — ” he trailed off, “after the books come out, if I’ll be interested in reading.”