New Haven Magazine Library
Grand Opening
138 Bradley St.
Sept. 2, 2026
Open the door of New Haven’s first and only magazine mini-library, and you’ll find a thick stack of Vogue, Harper’s, and The Atlantic. Keep going to uncover some niche reads, like TRUe: The Magazine for Sheet Metal Experts.
Organizers officially opened the library Thursday night at a celebration outside Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op near the corner of State Street. The “Little Free Library for magazines” unofficially opened (meaning, it was planted into the ground) back in early August, but that night, a thick red ribbon was wrapped around its tiny door.
Co-founders Oliver Egger and Peter Fulweiler shared some words before picking up a pair of ribbon-cutting scissors.
Egger credited the idea for the magazine library to a post in the New Haven subreddit. An out-of-towner asked about a place with good magazines; there was no straightforward answer.
So as a lover of magazines since high school, and a current editorial assistant at The Yale Review, Egger decided to build this new home for print media.
He described the sanctity of a magazine as a “container of attention, not algorithmic.”
“When something exists online, it exists in the same attention economy as social media. It competes against everything,” he said.
Egger recruited craftsman Fulweiler for the build, which took two to three weeks with leftover wooden scrap. As an active member of the Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op, Fulweiler texted Alana Ceppetelli, its community and programs manager, if the co-op could help out and house the project.
“The co-op is a DIY space, so we love when volunteers or friends of the community have an idea,” Cepetelli said.
When the ribbon was finally cut to the cheers of many East Rock neighbors, the library was swarmed with overlapping hands, all eager to go home with a read.
Activist Justin Farmer provided a cell phone flashlight for a young reader to flip through a robot magazine. Later in the night, Farmer picked up a copy of The Urban Review. He was unfamiliar with the publication, but was already hyper-attuned to brownfield remediation and redevelopment, so was confident the discovery would pay off.
I picked up the 2024 Art issue of “The Believer” for inspiration. When I’m done, I’ll return it for another neighbor to enjoy.
For more details about the magazine library, click on the above video to watch Justin Farmer’s conversation with Oliver Egger on WNHH FM’s “Just-in Time Conversations.”
