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Welcome to Librairie Semaine–the one-stop pop-up bookstore of your dreams. Created to celebrate the launch of our own, How to be a Tastemaker published by Gestalten in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris. Come by and discover everything your favourite Semaine Tastemakers from How to be a Tastemaker read, shop, and love. But first things first, what is a Tastemaker anyway? And what is taste? We traverse the streets of Paris with a girl on a journey (played by Prune Pauchet) to understand all things Taste. Will she finally understand where her taste comes from, or continue to be sheep choking on her own P’tit Basque (hint, it’s a French sheep’s cheese) with beret and baguette in tow?

Read on to discover the opening essay in How to be a Tastemaker written by Jonathan Mahon-Heap to guide you along the way. See you on the other side.

“Who makes taste? How to Be a Tastemaker gathers the characters of Semaine into one volume. To the extent that we can speak of a future, this is the future of taste—those who have crowbarred into movements and stepped through them with us, those who have opened doors and left them for us to walk through, those who cross-pollinate crafts with joy and curiosity. Taste for these characters is a way of living—a thread that they follow from waking moment to distant travel, whether by mind or body.

For writer Susan Sontag, “Rules of taste enforce structures of power”; that is, the lines of taste we toe are inherited—the way we break them or abide by them is, in some way, a subtle nod in the direction of society’s power players. This book has no fixed point of taste, no single reference point, no workings. Some covetable oddities will spark joy; others may prompt you to close its pages. Finance, age, geography do not dictate good taste. After all, it can, as Dolly Parton attests, cost a lot to look cheap. We take taste for granted. The brain, with its infini- ties, does not evolve to a decision on beauty by the reaction of the senses alone. The spectrum of cultural movements, of politics, of inheritance, are the engines of our thoughts; our brains are subject to something more ephemeral than beauty, are anchored to the treadmill of another pathology. They obey the logic, lessons, and luxury of what we have learned as good taste.

Researching for this foreword, finding the usual glut of information—articles both scholarly and non-scholarly on the subject—one of the more apt for the purpose was a piece by a neurologist examining the brain and its capacity for beauty. We know a lot about the structure of the human brain—where marvelousness lies in the organ, as well as the capacity for despair and hope. But one study was careful to conclude: “Whilst the optimist might wish for a complete understanding of human nature and experience from such studies, others may insist that a map of the brain can tell us no more about the mind than a terrestrial globe speaks of heaven and hell.” Allow, then, Semaine to help you chart this terrain instead. The joy is in finding the object, parsing apart the beauty from the ugliness. Taste is the trapdoor we uncover in a castle to a basement of riches. If you ever find yourself at a loss, in need of a source of taste—good, bad, and all the domains in between— our hope is that you turn to these pages. Taste is, as the saying goes, a little like pornography—you know it when you see it. We hope you see it in this book.”

By Jonathan Mahon-Heap for Semaine.