Nikki Igol wanted to open a public library. Whenever her artist friends visited her Brooklyn apartment, they would get lost in her collection of 2,500 magazines and art books that she had been building since childhood.
“They always left finding exactly what they needed,” she said.
When one day last year she ran into Steven Chaiken, whom she had not seen since they worked together at the fashion magazine V in the mid-aughts, an idea began to take shape.
Over coffee at the Odeon, they caught up on everything that had happened since they worked together over a decade ago: Mr. Chaiken had co-founded the buzzy artist management agency SN37; Ms. Igol had worked as a professional archivist and researcher at VFiles, the design firm Baron & Baron and for the makeup powerhouse Pat McGrath.
During their intern days, they remembered, the entire V office would crowd around the desk of whoever had the latest copy of French Vogue.
“We started in magazines when digesting print was a shared cultural experience,” Mr. Chaiken said. “Now everyone is siloed off on Instagram.”
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