The Making of the Paris Writers & Readers Club

A limited edition capsule collection with the iconic French shirt maker Figaret.

www.messynessychic.com/2025/07/29/13-things-i-found-on-the-internet-today-vol-748

Once upon a time, in a pre-smartphone world, people had to make their own entertainment. And so enters the salon, an Italian-influenced tradition of gathering of artists, writers, musicians, dancers, philosophers and intelligencia that flourished during a period known as the 'age of conversation'.

For those who like their evening tipple with a literary twist, Manhattan is resplendent with bars where famous writers once visited.

Books can be magical things, but some as it turns out, may be more magical than others.

Ah, Belle Epoque Paris: a lost world of artists, writers, dancers, philosophers and …. potheads? Today, we’re getting acquainted with the long forgotten Club des Hashischins, “Club of the Hashish-Eaters”, a 19th century gang of Parisians dedicated to drug-induced experiences, whose members included a gaggle of the most prolific intellectual names, including Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Baudelaire, and Honoré de Balzac to mention a few. Snacks ready? Let’s light this one up…

Picture Paris at the turn of the 20th century: a city drenched in absinthe, artistic ambition, and outrageous fashion choices. Amid the bohemian splendor of the Belle Époque, a woman named Renée Vivien, a Brit in Paris, emerged as a poetic powerhouse…

It's the DIY to rule them all: marbling. As in, those hypnotic patterns you find inside antique books, posh stationary, and packaging where it seems as if the whole of the colour spectrum has been syphoned through a kaleidoscope and poured onto a piece of paper. So what’s the story behind the painstaking craft?

The old  Public library of Cincinnati was the sort of place you only see in a Harry Potter film; colossal cast-iron book alcoves and spiral staircases that went several stories high, checker board marble floors that shone beneath the skylight roof; a magnificent maze of books that is now lost forever…

There was infinitely more to this passionate bohemian with her insatiable lust for life, for literature, for women, for men as well as for the natural world. It seems unsurprising then, that in the very end, her plants and garden effectively excited her as much as her writing or her romps within a ménage à trois. Let us now meet literature’s real-life Orlando…

If you can't have your own velvet-curtained library complete with dusty volumes, mysterious documents and antique treasures, how about a miniature one? www.messynessychic.com/2014/10/30/the-miniature-library-of-forgotten-curiosities

She was the kind of woman who never belonged to anyone but herself. At least, when it came to love. But for Natalie Clifford Barney, life overflowed with colour, creativity, and passion in Paris' Left Bank during one of city's most romantic periods. Think of her as a lesser-known Gertrude Stein…

www.messynessychic.com/2022/01/26/fitzgeralds-secret-girlfriend-literary-muse-or-victim-of-plagiarism

www.messynessychic.com/2024/03/21/a-libertines-5-step-lifestyle-plan-courtesy-of-colettes-lost-lover

A limited edition collection available now