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?
Davide Tolfo is an independent researcher whose work focuses primarily on world-building in contemporary art and theoretical fiction. He has written for several magazines and publishers, including Il Tascabile, NOT, La Deleuziana, Kabul, DinamoPress, Mimesis, Il Mulino, and Marsilio.
Federico Antonini is a designer, researcher and book collector. At the centre of his investigation, the relationship between conceptual art and book-making, the death of the page as a cultural object, and the (media) specificities of (re)production means.
