“I say meet because books have faces. The cover, the title, the design, the bindings. There are moments when you feel a spark.”
Kojima explained that he uses the verb meet for books because books have faces — the cover, the title, the design, the bindings — and there are moments when you feel a spark and pick one up. Before COVID he would go to one or two different bookstores every day and buy a book; now he goes less (weekends), checks things on social media and buys on Amazon, but none of that compares to the pleasure of going to the bookstore in person. His radar is not the stars of online reviews but the book’s face, and he reads the bookstore’s intentions: from the binding, the logo, the title or the cover you can tell which books they really want to sell, the effort of the guild, and because people at the publisher are professionals, what they push he feels he has to read. In 2026, he added that when choosing books he looked at the cover design, the afterword and the commentary, and was often right in his choices.
“Before COVID, I would go to one or two different bookstores every day and buy a book. […] I say meet because books have faces. […] But none of it compares to the pleasure of going to the bookstore in person. […] With books, the face is super important, and I'm not talking about the 3 out of 5 stars or whatever you see online.”