Boven Magazine Library

The back alleyways of Tai­pei City’s toney East District are the strategic high ground for those struggling to win the battle for customers in the culinary or fashion industries. Signs that are alternately elegant, splashy, or quirky vie for the attention of passersby. But there is one steel plaque hung on a wall which is unusually low profile: it is just a stylized lower-case letter “b.” If you aren’t paying attention, you could easily walk past it without even noticing.

Pushing open the transparent glass door and following the stairs downward, you find the Boven Magazine Library in the basement. The decor is industrial, with air ducts and pipes all visible. Secondhand American-style couches and terrazo flooring of the kind you only see in very old houses create a cozy atmosphere, making visitors feel right at home. Just pick a magazine that you like, pour yourself a glass of water, and bask in the charm of a printed periodical.

Racks display more than 300 current issues of European, American, Japanese and Taiwanese publications, while shelves house the library’s stock of back issues. The space is also home to an aficionados club called “Mag on the Spot.” During our visit, we see a reader flipping through a couple of issues from 1968 and 1969 of Life magazine, a now-defunct US periodical, the photographs and articles documenting the events of the day, the paper slightly yellowed. What a blast from the past as she duplicates the experience of any ordinary citizen who would have been following those events in real time!

“Magazines provide a kind of tactile experience, their physical form and printed layout literally bringing to your fingertips the intent of the publishers. You can’t get this kind of experience from online reading, because online information is fragmented to maximize hits and the emphasis is on browsing speed,” says Ken Peng, one of Boven’s founders. “Moreover, unlike books, which depend entirely on words to create an image in the mind of the reader, magazines, with text, photos, advertisements, and layout concepts that reflect the style of their times, are rich with the ambience of the era that produces them.” It is this charm of magazines that brought Peng together with Spencer Chou and Shawn Hsu to found the Boven Magazine Library early this year.

Just like the “casual chic” style which gives the library a powerful personality of its own, the name cards of the three founders also have an “alternative” character. Whereas most name cards have highbrow titles representing social status, theirs intriguingly say “reader,” “raconteur,” and “producer.”

The three men have different personalities and different areas of expertise, and play different roles in the library. Peng, a former wedding planner who is chatty and personable, is the “raconteur,” introducing the library and its contents to newcomers. Hsu, whose specialty is design, handles visual media like name cards, DMs, and posters, while also taking care of the finances. He is like the “producer” doing all the essential managerial work. Finally, Chou, the “reader,” is the inspirational leader who came up with the idea of the mag library in the first place. An avid reader of periodicals for over a decade, his fondness for the genre amounts almost to an addiction.

From pleasure to purposefulness

Chou recalls that early on in life he “didn’t understand anything about magazines at all.” It was only when he happened to land a job at Tower Records that he came into contact with the medium and began his journey of magazine readership. Peng, who has known Chou since they did their compulsory military service together, understands his obsession with these publications better than anyone. “He’s a ’zine freak, that’s all you can say.” Though Peng says this in a lighthearted tone, underlying the humor is genuine respect for Chou’s level of devotion.

Peng, who worked in the financial sector when he first got out of school, recalls that he asked Chou whether he too wouldn’t rather work in this high-income field. Chou’s reply has stuck with Peng all these years: “It doesn’t matter how much money I make, I’ll spend it all on magazines anyway.” Peng confesses that he could never equal Chou’s level of obsession, which even Chou himself cannot explain.

When it opened in mid-January of 2015, Boven attracted quite a lot of attention from the media and outsiders as a result of its unique atmosphere, spatial layout, and mode of operations. But the entrepreneurs behind it have a history that goes back much farther. A decade ago, Peng and Chou opened a multi-functional space, occupying a four-story apartment block in Tai­pei’s Shi­lin District, that combined lounge bar, coffee shop, fashion boutique, and magazine shop.

Peng started from the belief that the atmosphere determines what kind of customers a business attracts. Therefore, he wanted a genuine connoisseur—i.e., Chou—to take responsibility for the magazine specialty store in the basement. The hope was to create synergy that would attract customers interested in Chou’s highbrow magazines to the other areas of the multifunctional space, and vice versa, with the added bonus of giving Peng a cheaper source to fill the magazine racks he would place in the other areas of the space.

But the way the magazine shop was run quickly created storage problems for Chou. After a couple of years, because the location was less than ideal and they were unable to attract customers, they shut down the whole project. Despite the failure of their venture, it planted a seed that has been germinating in Chou’s mind for nearly ten years: the idea of creating a space specifically dedicated to magazines. This seed has sprouted into today’s magazine library.

Given his focus on periodicals over these years, Chou has progressed from being a mere “fan” who simply gains pleasure from reading magazines to thinking of these publications as “cultural heritage.” His aim is to provide a haven for every periodical that seems worth preserving.

The turning point came when Chou was working at the Xue Xue Institute for creative industries, and a guest speaker was describing the “Thailand Creative and Design Centre.” Chou was so impressed that he decided to check out the center in person.

Upon his visit, Chou was especially struck by the massive collections of information related to art and design that filled the center’s 12,000-plus-square-meter space, as well as by the layout that created spaces where designers could congregate to discuss ideas and express their thoughts. In contrast, Taiwan did not have any dedicated space where creative minds could seek inspiration and information. From this, the notion of a library specializing in art and design magazines was born.

The idea was propelled forward when Chou fell seriously ill in 2007, making him realize that he shouldn’t put off the things he wanted to do. Chou has never been satisfied doing just one thing at a time, and back then he was simultaneously running a CD and magazine shop called Under Records during the day while hosting a music-centered radio program late into the night. Burning the candle at both ends, his health gave out. He was rushed to the hospital with acute hepatitis, and had to stay there for two full months. Learning his lesson that you never know when misfortune might strike, he decided to make his magazine library dream come true at the earliest opportunity.

Where good things happen

Four years ago, Chou began a cooperative arrangement with Moose, a print and video rental chain, with Chou providing magazines that Moose would in turn rent out to coffee shops, hair salons, and similar establishments, with Chou and Moose splitting the profits. While this didn’t mark any departure from the traditional rental business, for Chou, who was in charge of periodical purchasing, it was an opportunity for him to try out his “micro-library” concept.

The possibility of the full library dream coming true arrived in 2013. At that time, Chou mentioned his dream to a woman named Jennifer Wang, the owner of a café near to a Moose shop. Wang, who was also acting as consultant to another café called A House, knew that the basement right below A House was vacant, so she acted as middleman to bring Chou together with the landlady, Clare Chen.

When Chen heard Chou’s scheme, she not only was willing to let the space, she even volunteered to pick up the NT$6 million tab for renovating the basement and waived the entire first year’s rent. A project that would have taken Chou three to five years to fund was brought on line far sooner. “I’ve been able to meet so many people from so many different walks of life just because I have this commitment to magazines,” explains Chou, “and as a result good things keep happening here one after another.”

A (b)read-and-water diet

Everywhere you look in Boven you see attention to detail, from the requirement that customers remove their shoes and change into slippers as they enter, to the space near the entryway reserved for exhibits of works by cutting-edge designers, to the tilting design of the service counter. And yet the “mission statement” is incredibly simple: to provide customers a space where they can focus exclusively and totally on reading periodicals. That is why, in contrast to the vast majority of shops in Taiwan that include some kind of food or beverages for sale, all you will see set out in front of customers who come to Boven—no matter whether one-time visitors who pay NT$300 for admission or members who pay NT$200 per time—are two things: reading material and water.

Chou says that there was quite an extended discussion before they finally decided to adopt this very unusual business model. Fortunately, it has met with a positive response in the marketplace: In the five-plus months since they have opened, they have taken on more than 200 members.

Having completed his dream space, Chou now plans to go a step further to create a “magazine reading map.” He wants to bring the zest of ’zines into the life of each and every person. With an expert like Chou holding down the fort, Boven is well positioned to design custom-made services for different clients, renting magazine packages with different themes depending on what each business needs or wants. The result would be a network of “micro-libraries” scattered across every corner of the city.

Do you feel discouraged by the welter of highly fragmented information on the Internet? The periodicals at the Boven Magazine Library are waiting for you to immerse yourself in a world made just for reading, to explore the past and be inspired for the future, and to enjoy a sense of wellbeing that belongs to you and you alone.

“The Boven Magazine Library is like a restaurant for the mind and spirit.”

The Boven Magazine Library, located in Taipei’s toney East District, has the latest European, American, Japanese, and Taiwanese magazines—yes, real printed matter!—which readers can peruse for leisure or in search of inspiration.

The Boven Magazine Library, located in Taipei’s toney East District, has the latest European, American, Japanese, and Taiwanese magazines—yes, real printed matter!—which readers can peruse for leisure or in search of inspiration.

The Boven Magazine Library, located in Taipei’s toney East District, has the latest European, American, Japanese, and Taiwanese magazines—yes, real printed matter!—which readers can peruse for leisure or in search of inspiration.

“Reader” Spencer Chou (left) and “raconteur” Ken Peng (right), two of the three founders of Boven, have created a totally unique space where magazine reading is a whole new experience.

Browsing through a magazine can take you away from the cacophony of the everyday world into a place of beauty and tranquility.