“I had, for years, thought that bookstores no longer needed to be comprehensive, because we can find a book online and we do,” says Aaron Hicklin, the editor-in-chief of Out magazine and co-editor of BlackBook magazine. “The best part of bookstores are the tables in the front with the staff recommendations. So I thought, what if an entire store was built around that concept? And what if the recommenders were names the attendees had heard of?”

Those questions served as the basis for Hicklin’s latest project, a “bookstore concept” called One Grand. Hicklin approached dozens of people he admires – friends, acquaintances, some total cold-calls – and asked them a simple question: if you were stuck on a desert island, which 10 books would you bring with you, and why? The results, culled from the likes of Tilda Swinton, Tom Ford, Ryan McGinley and Ta-Nehisi Coates, are simultaneously good ways to fill up your summer reading hours — Hicklin has, true to his mission, opened a pop-up shop selling the recommended books at Whisper Editions on Fulton Street — but they also represent a window into people’s tastes and worldviews. Books, Hicklin says, “tend to be signposts through their lives, signposts of who they’re becoming and their evolving philosophy and ideology on the world. I thought that if these books were annotated, they become this kind of biography of the person.”