The Book Handling Agency: A Fundraiser for Cabinet,
with Jeff Dolven, Merve Emre, Hal Foster, Heidi Julavits, and Others

Date: Saturday, 21 November 2026, 5:30–8:30 pm
Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins St., Brooklyn, NY (map and directions here)
Tickets: Tax-deductible tickets for this fundraiser are here.
(Important: Feel very free to zero out the ticketing platform’s optional 15% donation to their business—or reduce it to 3%, the real cost of their credit card processing fees.)

Join us for our fundraiser event featuring the fabled Book Handling Agency, an organization whose roster of scholars and writers have been trained over decades to transform your unread books into artifacts that will stand as monuments to your cultural erudition and discernment.

The agency brings to life Irish author Flann O’Brien’s 1941 satirical proposal for a service that would make any unread book appear as if “its owner has practically lived, supped, and slept with it for many months.” O’Brien imagined that the service would be of most value to wealthy people who have purchased large numbers of books in order to appear well-read. But we, of course, know that every library contains books that, despite best intentions, have not been—and, perhaps, never will be—read.

On the heels of its unprecedented success in Berlin, the Book Handling Agency is back in Brooklyn to offer a one-stop solution to this universal dilemma that also doubles as a fundraiser for our non-profit organization. Bring an unread book from your library, and let the agency’s expert handlers not only distress it outwardly but also add internal signs of devoted reading, ranging from judicious underlining to marginalia so clever that you will be eager to lend it to friends. Your professionally handled book will broadcast intellectual acumen for the rest of your life, and down through the ages. Adding to this renown, your name will also forever be emblazoned on our page acknowledging our generous donors.

Please note that for this special benefit event, the agency is offering a single option: its celebrated Superb Handling Package, which combines the very finest interventions from their à la carte menu. They are also offering three new add-ons for the occasion: Children’s drawings for an additional effet du réel; a “Moved to Tears” special in which one of their colleagues prone to crying will shed real tears over moving pasages in your book; and a “Polaroid Memento” special that immortalizes you, your book, and your annotator.

For those unable to attend in person, we have arranged a mail-in option exclusively for non-readers located in the US. As long as your book arrives at Cabinet’s Brooklyn office by 21 November, the agency will handle it, superbly, and Cabinet will return it to you by mail.

Inquiries about this event and the agency’s full range of services should be directed to thebookhandlingagency@cabinetmagazine.org.

The Superb Handling Package

This special benefit package includes multicreasing and mauling of spine & detailed edge work; 2 stains using tea and/or coffee; 3 stains using expensive wine, port, or cognac; 2 culturally sophisticated page markers; 5 scholastic dog-ears; 10 underlined passages using high-quality ink and/or Bavarian graphite; 4 arbitrary pieces of marginalia from the agency’s famed collection of discerning stock phrases; 4 contextually appropriate pieces of marginalia from said collection; 4 custom-written scholarly pieces of marginalia; 1 forged message of affection and gratitude from the author (if plausible); marking with agency seal

The Agency’s À La Carte Menu

The Brooklyn Technical Team
Book Assessor: Emilie Meyer
The Spinebreaker: Richard Fleming
Abrasion Specialist (Light): TBD
Abrasion Specialist (Heavy): Nina Katchadourian
Fluid Dynamics Specialist: Margot Bancroft
The Smudger: Ivy Lockhart
Interstitialator (Mundane): TBD
Interstitialator (Sophisticated): TBD

We thank the agency for supporting our fundraiser and for allowing us to share this behind-the-scenes video of some of the proprietary technical procedures that will be on display during the benefit.

About the Annotators (more coming!)
Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics at Princeton University. He is the author of Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (The University of Chicago Press, 2007), Senses of Style: Poetry Before Interpretation (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), and the admittedly hasty Take Care (Cabinet Books, 2017), as well as two books of poems, Speculative Music (Sarabande, 2013) and *A New English Grammar (Dispersed Holdings, 2022). He is an editor-at-large at Cabinet.

Merve Emre teaches creative writing and criticism at Wesleyan University and directs the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She is the author of The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing (Doubleday, 2018), Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), and The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia University Press, 2020). She is currently completing Post-Discipline: Two Futures for Literary Study and writing a new book, Love and Other Useless Pursuits.

Hal Foster teaches modern art and critical theory at Princeton University. He is the author, most recently, of Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics (The MIT Press, 2025), co-edits October, and writes regularly for The London Review of Books.

Heidi Julavits is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction and writes for magazines on topics such as land art, avalanches, and volcanic eruptions. She’s a co-founder of The Believer magazine and a professor at Columbia University.