We’re very excited to introduce The Great Purchase, our 2026 acquisition strategy.
This year, 100 books will be added to our collection and readers will shape what enters our shelves. Through programmes, discussions and in-person activations throughout the year, you’ll have the opportunity to advocate for titles, identify gaps in the collection and help prioritise what gets acquired.
Rather than selecting books through internal curation alone, we’re embedding the community directly into the process. Because the voices, stories and forms of knowledge on our shelves will continue to reflect the needs, interests and lived experiences of the people using the library.
Our first programme is coming soon, find out how to get involved: tintlibrary.org/thegreatpurchase (also in our bio).
Lots of love,
Tint
Some moments from our pop-up @cornerstonestudios_ 1 Addington Square, SE5 7JZ 📎📎📎 we’ve had a lot of fun in the library so far and it’s been warming seeing people come to the space.
If you’re yet to visit, you still have 2 more weeks to catch us here. Within those 2 weeks, we’ve also got programming: tintlibrary.org/programmes
Hope to see you soon x
Tint
SIN BUG
📎a part of Tint’s collection, selected by Bernice Mulenga under The Great Purchase
📎about: A new book by poet-activist CAConrad combining essay, memoir and (Soma)tic poetry rituals. Documenting the pervasive homophobic violence of the 1980s and the overwhelming losses of AIDS, this work is an unwavering testament to queer resilience. CA’s text forms a resounding incantation to friends and lovers lost. SIN BUG is the first book published as part of the Open Narratives series.
📎The Great Purchase: The Great Purchase is Tint Library’s 2026 acquisition strategy, adding 100 books to the collection through reader-led selection. Rather thar acquiring books through internal curation alone, the community shapes what enters the collection through programmes, discussions and activations throughout the year. This approach ensures the library grows in response to the needs, interests and lived experiences of the people who use it.
Available for Regular loans via tintlibrary.org/caconrad
The African Desperate
📎a part of Tint’s collection
📎about: The African Desperate follows Palace Bryant on one very long day in 2017 that starts with her MFA graduation in upstate New York and ends at a Chicago Blue Line Station. Set against the lush back- drop of late summer, Palace navigates the pitfalls of self-actualization and the fallacies of the art world. Shot through with Syms’s celebrated conceptual grit, humor, social commentary, and vivid visual language, The African Desperate leads us through picturesque landscapes and artists’ studios, from academic critiques to backseat hookups, and from the night of a wild graduation party to the morning of a lonely trip back home. @martinesyms
Available for Regular loans via tintlibrary.org/theafricandesperate
Pictures from our References in Practice session last week.
This programme is one of many to be produced under The Great Purchase (our year-long strategy to add 100 books to Tint’s collection through reader-led selection.)
The Great Purchase embeds readers directly into the acquisition process, community input shaping what gets acquired, not just internal decisions.
More info via tintlibrary.org/thegreatpurchase
18/100 ❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥
Until next time,
Tint
Hey, we’re excited to share References in Practice. This is an intimate session for artists and practitioners of all disciplines to share work-in-progress alongside the references informing their practice.
Participants will each present current work and the books, texts or materials shaping their thinking.
References mentioned throughout the session will be documented and acquired for Tint’s collection.
📎 Sign-up through the link in our bio
This session is for Black artists and practitioners.
This session is co-facilitated by curator & researcher Haja Fanta (@haja.fanta_ ). Kindly hosted at Steel Studios (@steel.444 )
Love,
Tint x
Queer Phenomenology
📎a part of Tint’s collection, selected by Yasmin Ali under The Great Purchase
📎about: Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.
📎The Great Purchase: The Great Purchase is Tint Library’s 2026 acquisition strategy, adding 100 books to the collection through reader-led selection. Rather than acquiring books through internal curation alone, the community shapes what enters the collection through programmes, discussions and activations throughout the year. This approach ensures the library grows in response to the needs, interests and lived experiences of the people who use it.
Available for Regular loans via tintlibrary.org/queerphenomenology
Black Film British Cinema II
📎 a part of Tint’s collection, selected by Uzi Okotcha under The Great Purchase.
📎 about: Black Film British Cinema II considers the politics of Blackness in contemporary British cinema and visual practice. This second iteration of Black Film British Cinema, marking over 30 years since the ground-breaking ICA Documents 7 publication in 1988, continues this investigation by offering a crucial contemporary consideration of the textual, institutional, cultural and political shifts that have occurred from this period. It focuses on the practices, values and networks of collaborations that have shaped the development of Black film culture and representation. But what is Black British film? How do such films, however, defined, produce meaning through visual culture, and what are the political, social and aesthetic motivations and effects? How are the new forms of Black British film facilitating new modes of representation, authorship and exhibition? (…)
@cjnwonka
📎 The Great Purchase: The Great Purchase is Tint Library’s 2026 acquisition strategy, adding 100 books to the collection through reader-led selection. Rather than acquiring books through internal curation alone, the community shapes what enters the collection through programmes, discussions and activations throughout the year. This approach ensures the library grows in response to the needs, interests and lived experiences of the people who use it.
Available for Regular loans via tintlibrary.org/clivenwonka
Some images from our Bookshop Browse last week at ICA.
This programme is one of many to be produced under The Great Purchase (our year-long strategy to add 100 books to Tint’s collection through reader-led selection.)
Tint Library Card holders joined us, each choosing books they think should be accessible. Some picked books that changed their practice, some filled gaps in the collection and some advocated for titles in a specific category.
The Great Purchase embeds readers directly into the acquisition process, community input shaping what gets acquired, not just internal decisions.
More info via tintlibrary.org/thegreatpurchase
14/100❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥
See you at the next programme,
Tint x
Join us at the ICA for the first programme under The Great Purchase.
Browse the ICA bookshop’s (@icalondon ) selection of art books, artist publications and critical texts. Choose a title that fits within Tint’s collection categories, something you think should be accessible to the wider readership. Each reader has a budget, and all selected books will be purchased by the library and added to the collection.
Capacity is super limited, link in bio to register.
Until later,
Tint x
Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan
📎a part of Tint’s collection
📎about: Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of June Jordan’s poetry. Collecting the finest work from Jordan’s ten volumes, as well as dozens of “last poems” that were never published in Jordan’s lifetime, these more than six hundred pages overflow with intimate lyricism, elegance, fury, meditative solos, and dazzling vernacular riffs.
As Adrienne Rich writes in her introduction, June Jordan “wanted her readers, listeners, students, to feel their own latent power of the word, the deed, of their own beauty and intrinsic value.”
Available for Regular loans via tintlibrary.org/junejordan
Tender Noted
📎a part of Tint’s collection
📎about: Tender Noted (2022) is a meditation on the intersection of desire, mourning, and listening to one’s skin while coming to understand the practice of love. This interdisciplinary work brings together images from Miller’s filmic and photographic practice, informed by and given voice to by Miller’s writing. The book’s organizing principle is the echo: between text and image and between bodies and the stages, rooms, and affects they inhabit.
Taking up skin as a site of history and intimacy with the self and across generations, Miller holds space both for the body’s vulnerabilities and its maladies. Moving between poems and lists, diaristic writing, and plays, which feature characters such as Mrs. Lovely, Miller asks what types of speech, postures, and practices define the self within the entanglement of relation. Tender Noted is a study on love in its everyday pain and pleasure. (@freddie.june )
Available for Regular loans via tintlibrary.org/shalamiller
