An Evening with Marginal Notes
Client
London Review of Books
Deliverables
Creative production, spatial design, event direction, contributor management
The London Review of Books commissioned Touché to produce a one-night salon - part live reading, part gathering - held off-grid in a private Bloomsbury library. The format was loose, but the intention was precise: to shape a space that felt like stepping inside a footnote.
We developed the spatial and narrative structure of the evening around the rhythm of an LRB editorial: quiet beginning, long-form middle, unresolved end. The room was minimally lit with reading lamps and left deliberately cold at the edges - intimacy in the centre, distance around it. Seating was arranged in concentric arcs, with no stage or lectern. Contributors read from prepared notes, passing the focus from one to the next with only a pause between. Guests received printed materials folded into a single sheet - no programme, just margin notes in magenta ink. Touché’s role spanned from the structural to the subtle: from speaker rehearsals to furniture sourcing to the logistics of timed entry. The result was an event that asked nothing of its audience but presence - a reading you entered physically.