Next Friday, July 3, the shelves at Aesop’s Soho shop will be swept clear of Resurrection Aromatique hand wash, Parsley Seed cleansing oil and Marrakech Intense EDP. The skincare and beauty products will be replaced with books for the sixth edition of the Aesop Queer Library.
Tomes by 33 LGBTQIA+ authors have been chosen for this year’s library, and visitors are invited to select and take home a free book – with no purchase required. This year’s selection includes new works by writers like Kae Tempest, Stella Award-winner Lee Lai, Jason Okundaye, Brandon Taylor and Yrsa Daley-Ward. A featured title, The Log Books, by Tash Walker and Adam Zmith, follows four decades of queer life in Britain via call logs from Switchboard, the national support line for the LGBTQIA+ community, which were found in a crawlspace in the organisation’s office. As part of this year’s Queer Library, the Aesop Foundation – which aims to give voice to “excluded communities” – will donate money to Switchboard and the trans+ charity Not a Phase.
Each year the library is themed; in 2026, the theme is Body of Work, a celebration of queer writers who depict bodies as sites of power, pleasure, resistance and renewal. For the 2026 edition, Aesop has expanded the library to Queer Reading Rooms in its shops in Spitalfields and Brighton, which will both stock this year’s titles.
The Aesop Queer Library runs at Soho from July 3–5. The Spitalfields Queer Reading Room is open from July 3–5, and the Brighton Queer Reading Room runs from July 31–August 2.
