On an unassuming thoroughfare, fronted by the most modest and honest of block like font adorned A-frame folding signs—one could almost miss it. Just as Emmy and I narrowly did. Certainly do not do that. Do not miss it.
It's one of those perfectly tucked and nested railway style units. Layered internally and unassuming from first glance. One that unravels as you step closer to investigate. You’d have to discover this textural space that once housed archival film reels during it's heyday with a sort of intention. I would later wonder if this was a subconscious doing by its owner. That the simplistic signal itself would only call to those who were meant to wander in.
A lovely warm greeting from brainchild Elpitha Tsoutsounakis, after briefly staring at us from behind her slightly lowered spectacles. Earnest and present, she welcomed us as if we had known each other since grade school. Not an ounce of hesitation to share and connect.
The space isn't a typical shop. It reads more like a test kitchen or lab in essence--I can't decide which. It's a container of conversation, a place of meaning. Part creative studio, part shop, part dare to dream and thoughtfully curated, well appointed ephemera. A vision that could be mistaken for just a retail store in any other metropolitan city. Japanese mechanical pencils, drafting tools, and art books. Yet, the deeper you dig and the more you ask, the more you'll understand what sets Elpitha and Books & Supply apart from so many retail focused businesses. Everything in her shop feels like there's a connection to a creative process and rooted in the natural world.
For Elpitha, Books & Supply grew out of a desire to break beyond the paradigm of limitations as a university instructor. She wanted to reconnect design with a wider audience.
“I wanted it to be a community space. I really believe in the studio model--of people working in the studio and having dialogue and iterating their work. Those blank spaces are often the most valuable because they allow other people to activate them. At a really deep fundamental level, I think community is important for our survival. Community means understanding that as people, we are dependent on others and others and dependent on us."
Elpitha grew up in Salt Lake City in a first-generation Greek immigrant family.
"I feel like I'm always in between," she says. "Here I am not American enough, or in Greece I'm not Greek enough."
Straddling between both cultures often creates a complexity and perspective that eventually made it's way into her design practice. It was later through teaching, research, and working with natural pigments, that she began to reconnect those ideas with her own cultural history and gave a different understanding of design. Her work with ochres became particularly transformative.
While working with students in southern Utah, her three sons in tow gave notice to the colors of the earth around them. Could we paint with them? She looked it up. That simple poignant question became the beginning of years of research into ochres- the earth pigments that now sit at the center of her creative practice.
“The same iron that makes the ochres and that’s in the geology is the same iron that’s in our bodies and makes our life possible.”
When she first opened Books & Supply, she says "I didn't trust myself because I didn't think I could do something that people wanted or that would be successful. I'm interested in making as a form of knowledge production," she says. "You've got to kind of embrace it and do it yourself."
This last year, she says, has been about learning to trust herself again. That willingness to step forward without knowing exactly what comes next has shaped much of her life. Her path into architecture was an accident. She began college as a biochemistry major. One day, while delivering an assignment for a photography class, she walked through the architecture studios. She had never been inside one before.
"It was chaotic and messy and the smell and just people working together and the passion and the excitement and even the frustration and anger- all of it was just palpable." She remembers thinking: "I don't know what this is, but this is what I want to be doing."
"I think if I can get folks to trust themselves and believe in another way of imagining the world and world-making, I think that that's a huge impact as well."
For all the things we may believe we know or don’t know about where we’re heading in this confusing landscape of the digital age, Books and Supply is a smoke signal. A campfire. A light in the dark. Perhaps dimly lit. Because we’re not huge fans of florescent overhead lighting.
Books & Supply
252 East 100 South
Salt Lake City, Utah
(801) 618-0496
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