Forma Libris creates bespoke libraries for institutions and individuals. We build collections that reflect your soul, and also help you to enrich it.
Services
Hotels
We create libraries for hotels that echo their distinct senses of place and perspective. Working in common areas and guest rooms alike, we use books to add visual and emotional value to guests’ experiences. Much like books, we believe hotels can transport their visitors into alternate universes that leave lasting impressions long after checkout. Our hotel curation services can be tailored to any location, theme, or atmosphere. And our founder’s background gives our hotel clients a one-of-a-kind amenity to offer, with a library created by an active literary critic with deep roots across the publishing and art worlds.
Private Collections
Books can both shape and reflect who we are. They serve as portals to other worlds that help us dream, imagine, and shape our values. That’s why our first step in developing private collections is getting to know you. What do you love and care about? What fascinates you? From there, we build out a one-of-a-kind library precisely attuned to your spirit and values. The exact composition is developed from our conversations together, but libraries can be made up of fiction, non-fiction, history, poetry, art books, rare books, antiques, and more. We can work in almost any sized space, and are able to curate a library for you on a one-time basis, or with ongoing updates.
Corporate Libraries
A library can bring significant intellectual and cultural capital to an office. It serves as a physical space to help employees think expansively, while also creating a meaningful differentiation between the office and home. We create corporate libraries based on a company’s unique values and goals, bringing our founder’s extensive education in the universe of ideas to bear on each library’s development. Extensively trained in the humanities and social sciences, our founder specializes in seeing connections between disparate ideas, authors, and perspectives. From there, she creates libraries reflective of each company’s unique perspective that also spark creativity and a sense of possibility in its people.
About Us
Forma Libris founder Elizabeth Nicholas draws from a deep well of expertise to curate her clients' libraries. Elizabeth holds an MSc in Literature from the University of Edinburgh, where she served on the committee for the James Tait Black Prize, Britain’s oldest literary award. She also received a Master of Fine Arts from New York University’s Creative Writing Program, where she was awarded a fellowship and worked with a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer on her thesis. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Elizabeth concentrated in history, won multiple literary awards, and studied under some of the foremost literary critics of the 21st century. She has since published essays and criticism in magazines and newspapers worldwide, including The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vogue, New York Magazine, and TIME. In 2023, Elizabeth was the recipient of a MacDowell fellowship in literature.
Elizabeth’s personal library of several thousand books is global and diverse, traveling with her around the world and now residing in her home in Paris, France. Elizabeth reads deeply across continents, time periods, and genres, collecting fiction, nonfiction, history, poetry, art books, new publications, rare books, antiques, and more. She has developed meaningful relationships across the publishing industry with authors, editors, book dealers, and publishers, which she draws upon to help her clients create their collections.
Contact
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