Inside Earth's most based members-only club
Plus swag lessons from plants, dressing like a Belgian living room, and more unbeatable recon
This is Concorde, Blackbird Spyplane’s “women’s vertical,” except it’s for everyone who is cool. Every edition is archived here.
The B.L.I.S.S. List — a helpful rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples from dental floss to socks — is here.
Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here. Spyfriends recently shared intel on where to go in Montreal, Guadalajara and Rome.

Spy Nation is the #1 Most Literary-Minded Readership Across All Newsletters. And yet I wonder if some of you, like me, have in recent years forsaken your relationship with the public library. Not actively forsaken it, but through unintended neglect. Maybe it’s a Covid-era thing — lockdowns plus the desire to support independent booksellers — but a few weeks back I popped into our local branch after a long absence and discovered that my library card … had expired.
I could not let this stand. Definitely not in the same year that Party Girl — the best movie ever made starring Parker Posey as a sauced-out librarian who throws sick raves after hours — turns 30. Thankfully, renewing my membership to the only club cool enough to allow everyone in for free took less than 5 minutes. Then I said, F**k it and joined my branch’s “Friends of the Library” program, too — yours likely has one — which is a sort of Public Goods & Services Platinum Tier where you donate some bread and enjoy, e.g., perks at local bookshops in a mutually beneficial 📖 🔁 📖 circle of reading.
I don’t need to tell you why the library is good. But I will say that, whereas Jonah just wrote about how his acquisitive brainworms are mostly clothing-related — and I do have those, too — the compulsive copping parasites that burrow deepest into my skull really love books. I have a robust vintage art-book collection that I love digging through and adding to. Lately, though, I’ve tried to curb the impulse to buy every vibey tome that appeals to me, and I gotta salute the library’s built-in preventative technology on this score. We cop, in the most primal Swag Caveman sense, because we want to drag something new across our thresholds. Well, how about scratching that itch by checking out up to 75 (not a typo — that’s actually the max in Oakland) slappers of the mind at a time? And if online shopping is a problem for you, let me tell you that simply saving books to my “digital bookshelf” on the library’s site gives me much the same feeling as “adding to cart.”
My libraraissance was sparked by a holy grail book on the sculptor Thaddeus Mosley that Herman Miller design archivist and Spyfriend Amy Auscherman shouted out when I interviewed her back in 2020. Mosley is a 99-year-old Pennsylvania-based artist who wears clothes extremely well, as seen below top, and whose salvaged wood sculptures stand plinth to plinth with Brancusi and Noguchi. The book in question, published in 2020 by Karma, sold out with alacrity, and whenever I looked for it at resale I could only find it priced higher than I was ready to pay — for instance, $350 at L.A.’s Arcana Books.
Through the power of recon, I tracked down an older book about Mosley’s work, from 1997. There were some copies asking ~$100 online, and a single reference copy available at Oakland’s non-circulating African American Museum and Library. I had never visited this beautiful, grand old building before — see my pictures above — and I spent a lovely afternoon there in the company of this book, enjoying it while spending zero dollars.
Not that there’s any shame in buying books. A house that doesn’t have books stacked in cairns across all manner of implausible but horizontal surfaces tends to look as lifeless to me as a house without plants. At Spyplane HQ we double-decker the books on our shelves, stack them into columns on the floor and, when that fails, just kind of let them be everywhere, like pets.
Today I’m sharing a bunch of my all-time art and design books. Some I’ve owned for decades, and they still give me a little jolt of excitement every time I open them. Some are more recent acquisitions. While none of these books are explicitly about fashion, they’ve all influenced the way I dress and think about putting together outfits in some way or other. I’m as likely (maybe more??) to get the germ of a fantastic outfit idea from, say, a 1970s book about ikebana as I am from the latest runway collections…
Let’s start with the newest, and most thrilling, addition, a rare art book from 1981: