Puck, an online publication aspiring to connect name-brand journalists to wealthy and powerful readers, launched last year funded in part by TPG, “a private-equity firm with a hundred and thirty-five billion dollars in assets,” according to a recent account by Clare Malone in the New Yorker. Despite those deep pockets, and an initial raise of $7 million, however, the photo accompanying Malone’s piece indicates that the bookshelves at Puck HQ are curiously bare.
Editorial offices, even relatively new ones, tend to look like something out of Hoarders, bursting at the seams with review copies and research materials. To eyes habituated to that typical clutter, the Puck photo presents a disconcerting image; one that suggests something more like a furniture ad than a newsroom.
Further deepening the irreality was the question of where these shelves are located. Though it’s common and, given the cost of renting office space in New York, even prudent for a media startup to avoid the expense of a lease, if possible, they are (presumably) real shelves. Where are they?
Despite its positioning as a cutting-edge Information Age publishing enterprise, Puck is forbiddingly hard to Google, its results swamped by those for the fabled 19th century humor magazine of that name, and for the immense and fancifully decorated Lafayette Street office where the magazine was edited and published—and which, a century later, was home to Spy magazine, co-founded by Graydon Carter, who eventually became editor of Vanity Fair. This is the history that led Jon Kelly, a former protege of Carter, to name his new venture Puck. (Now Jared Kushner’s family company owns the Puck Building and it has expensive condos in it.)
This new Puck is not in the Puck Building, apparently. Its website lists no physical address or phone number, just a single email address: fritz@puck.news, for what Malone calls an “automated e-mail persona.” (...)
But: the shelves! With a few exceptions, the selection of books we could make out here has Airport Bookshop written all over it. How did they land on these shelves?
Popula counts 29 books on the slate-gray bookcases in this photo (not counting the 11 uniform volumes of whatever periodical is arranged on the second shelf down, the title of which we were unable to determine). [UPDATE: See below.]
There’s also a plant cutting in water in a “chocolate Negroni” bottle, apparently repurposed from a $140 four-pack of premixed cocktails. Of the 29 visible books, we were able to identify 14, at least three of which were written by Puck staffers: How To Be Black by Baratunde Thurston, and House of Cards and Money and Power by William D. Cohan. Here are the ones we could make out, with excerpts from their relevant blurbs and promotional copy:
