Reading Materials with
Reginald Moore feat.
The Row
Menswear FW21

“I’m an only child, so my love of reading started there,” says Reginald Moore, the Chattanooga-based book collector, whose Instagram account has become, to some extent, a digital archive of his remarkable, decades-long project. “My mother, she’s a reader, too. There were always books around. My father always gave me money to buy books and my mother always made sure I took care of them.”

In his early 20s, Moore—who grew up in Charleston—would regularly venture to Chattanooga to visit a rare bookstore, discovering its trove of Southern literature, “Faulkner and all that kind of stuff,” while also gaining an understanding of how to identify first editions based on each publisher’s cataloguing process. His passion, he says, “snowballed from there.”

Moore’s collection isn’t limited to books. Postcards, vinyls, additional materials from Criterion Collection releases, magazines—both contemporary and collectible—as well as literary journals, occupy considerable real estate in his archive. Like a 1965 issue of Jazz featuring an essay by Amiri Baraka, then known as Leroi Jones, about Archie Shepp and John Coltrane. Or an April 1971 issue of Harper’s Bazaar with China Machado gracing the cover, photographed by Bill King. There’s more. Sonia Sanchez poetry, with art by Emory Douglas. Vintage issues of Show magazine, with articles by James Baldwin. Odes to Edna Lewis. Remembrances of David Wojnarowicz. Prints by Roy DeCarava.

Moore’s curation is prodigious with a field of vision that acknowledges certain trends in publishing, design, cover stars. One post on his Instagram, for instance, includes various recent magazine covers profiling Moses Sumney. Another one documents Michaela Coel’s ascent. There’s also a post that pays tribute to Agnès Varda on two separate covers of Interview magazine, five decades apart. While Moore is a patron of print media, his act of retrieval isn’t merely nostalgic, but comprehensive and refreshingly coincident with the times. He stays unguarded and porous, and most of all, is squarely delighted by new voices, just as much as by those who came before.

Over the phone, Moore tells me how he considers his collection a “working library;” meaning he actually reads the books he has amassed, totalling somewhere in the thousands.

Fred Astaire has an allure in my family because my maternal grandfather courted my grandmother by singing her a Fred Astaire song. [My grandfather] was a really thin, wiry guy and so, Fred Astaire’s name has always been thrown around in my family, even if my grandfather couldn’t dance.

I went to New York when I was 16 to see Ailey, but at the time, I was obsessed with Robbie Williams, and I went to see him, too, at TRL with Carson Daly. And we were all outside and we couldn’t wait to see Robbie, and now that I’m thinking about it, this story has nothing to do with dance! Anyways, this guy outside told us he knew Robbie Williams and I believed him because he had a British accent. And I guess my Alvin Ailey story has turned into a story about Robbie Williams!

I just remember PBS was showing this old clip of Judith doing the choreography of “Cry” and I became obsessed with her. First of all, I loved her short hair. She looked like people I knew, but was doing something that the people I knew could not do. I mean, what would the exterior or interior life of dance look like without Judith Jamison? I do remember that in one of those books, there’s a story about Judith trying to make macaroni and cheese like her mother, but she couldn’t do it. Can you believe that a macaroni and cheese story is my takeaway from a Judith Jamison book?!

When we talk about dance, his name is always on the back of our throats but it’s never on the tip of our tongues.

My introduction to Martha Graham was probably through Madonna. I’m pretty sure there’s an issue of Harper’s Bazaar and Madonna’s on the cover, and on the inside she’s dressed like Martha Graham, wrapped in black material all around her. But also, I have so many memories associated to Martha Graham. This one time, I was out to dinner—not at a fancy restaurant, because there was a TV involved. And I happened to look up and Jeopardy! was on, and the question had something to do with Martha Graham, and I just remember looking up and seeing a clip of her and thinking Wow. Nobody else could go off like her. It’s just a beautiful thing.