Did you read the Seattle bookstore shout-out in The New York Times yesterday? It came in an article about a small private library/reading room that's opened in Brooklyn:

Lucas Pinheiro and Magda Mortner entered the Mellow Pages Library in Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon, greeted the others there, and began to look at some of the library’s inventory of 1,300 books, many of them from obscure presses or by little-known writers.

Ms. Mortner, 22, sat on a brown bench seat pulled from a van and leafed through a stack of books that included a volume of poems by Mark Leidner titled “Beauty Was the Case That They Gave Me.”

Mr. Pinheiro, 26, settled into a conversation with a fellow browser, touching upon the Brazilian landless movement, student occupations at universities and the writings of Michel Foucault.

While that went on, Matt Nelson, a graduate student in creative writing at Queens College and one of the library’s two founders, explained the origins of the place, which is meant to serve as a reading room and gathering spot in addition to book lender. Mr. Nelson and Jacob Perkins, both 26, started the library in February, inspired in part by Pilot Books, a bookstore in Mr. Nelson’s hometown, Seattle, that carried volumes by independent publishers, and which closed in 2011.

Pilot Books had a short life, but it made a huge impact: the APRIL Festival started as a Pilot Books project, and now this lending library is garnering attention on the east coast.

Sounds like Mellow Pages—Christ, but I hate that name—has learned from Pilot Books' closing, too, by modeling the business on a library and not a bookstore. The one thing that Pilot had plenty of was a sense of community. By selling memberships, Mellow Pages—ugh—is benefitting from the community in a way that Pilot didn't. Maybe someone inspired by Mellow Pages—in every way but the name—can bring this idea back home to Seattle, possibly in conjunction with a bar space?