Vincent Phan - A gentle voice for the culture of reading

Has the kind of books you’re drawn to shifted across different seasons of your life? If so, how would you summarise your life through the books you’ve read?

It has shifted enormously, and I think there is something really interesting about tracing a life through its reading.

In my teenage years, I was drawn to science fiction - Asimov, Douglas Adams - and to fantasy: Tolkien, Pratchett’s Discworld, historical fiction. In my early twenties, as an economics student, I gravitated toward business and personal growth books. I devoured titles like The Lean Startup and the Daily Stoic. Then, in my mid-twenties to early thirties, I began reading philosophy and physics - Harari’s Sapiens, Graber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, Sagan’s Cosmos. I became fascinated with the writings of Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Brian Greene, Michio Kaku and Chris Hadfield.

Today, I find myself drawn to poetry and romance. I read Rumi and Neruda for the way they write about devotion, Kahlil Gibran for the way he writes about the sacred in the ordinary, Warsan Shire and Ocean Vuong for the way they write about longing and belonging. And I have fallen in love with Austen and García Márquez - writers who understood that love is not a subplot, but the whole story.

How did 1000 Libraries begin, and how did you set such a high quality bar for it from the start?

Before 1000 Libraries was the media company it is today, it was a side project - an Instagram page I created in 2020, sharing photographs of libraries and bookstores I had visited. For reasons I did not fully anticipate, it resonated deeply with the book-loving community. Perhaps people were in lockdowns and searching for something meaningful. The page grew from one follower - thanks, mum - to five hundred thousand by 2023, at which point I decided to build it into a media and publishing company focused on literary travel and book culture.

Today we have around 1.8 million followers across our platforms, a super popular weekly online magazine, books, and many other exciting projects. My vision has always been to celebrate the extraordinary literary spaces that exist across the world and to keep them visible and relevant.

At heart, I am not much of a businessman. I simply love to tell stories. I am a creative director and editor-in-chief, and that is why everything we produce must be aesthetically compelling. Exceptional design and photography are inherent to 1000 Libraries. The artists and creatives we work with must possess an extraordinary eye.

You once described yourself as neurodivergent, and you’ve never been someone who stays long after realising that something no longer fits. Yet 1000 Libraries has held your attention for more than five years. What has made this project so different?

I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism late in life, at thirty. That diagnosis made sense of a pattern that had defined my adult years: moving from one career to another, searching not just for professional fulfilment, but for the place where I could most contribute positively to the world with the particular skills and gifts I had been given.

I once read a book called Ikigai, and it resonated with me deeply. Since then, I have been on a continuous search for that convergence. That search was not always romantic. I lived extremely modestly for over eight years after I left the corporate world, struggling to make ends meet. There were long stretches of eating noodles every day. But I made it work. And I would not change anything.

The best thing I did during that time was become a bookseller. It gave me something I had not found anywhere else: the chance to tell stories to people. Not just book narratives, but the lives of authors, philosophical ideas, the connections between what someone was living through and what a certain book could offer them. It was the thread that ran through everything.

So when 1000 Libraries took off as a side project, I recognised it immediately. This was the thing. This was my ikigai. Not selling books to one customer at a time, but keeping bookstores and libraries alive by inspiring people to visit them, to choose them over online convenience, to fall in love with these spaces again.

I will always remember the day a customer I thanked for buying a book I had recommended looked at me and said: “No - thank you. You’re the one keeping culture alive.” That moment touched something deep in my heart, and it has never left.

You had started many book-related projects before. What experiences did those give you? And what made 1000 Libraries grow so quickly?

I personally published two books. The first was The Most Beautiful Book Places in the World. The story behind it is quite something, actually. I reached out to publishing houses and was rejected by most. One of them offered a deal I found deeply underwhelming, and I respectfully declined. Instead, I took the project to Kickstarter and raised a quarter of a million dollars - five times what I needed to publish the book. It became one of the most successful publishing projects ever launched on the platform.

From there, I built a team around our publishing operation and launched a second book, Protectors of the Written Word, for which I travelled the world to interview people who had dedicated their lives to spreading the joy of reading. That campaign raised ten times its target.

Since then, we have published an adult colouring book designed to help people slow down, and more recently a physical letter subscription to inspire children to love books again. Our publishing team has grown from just me to a team of over ten people. We employ people from all around the world - eighty per cent women, and many from minority communities.

I think what made 1000 Libraries different was that, by the time it took off, I had already learned what I needed to learn through those earlier projects. I understood media, marketing, publishing, I understood community, and most importantly, I understood what I was really trying to say. This time, everything aligned.

See also: Memories of homeland in Tran Huy Oanh's paintings

You seem to have a dreamy and curious side within you. Does the project feed that part of you? On this journey, what fulfils and excites you the most?

I love what I do with my whole heart. It is, for me, the best work in the world.

I am a lifelong learner, and deeply optimistic. And even though the world can appear dark at times, I believe deeply in the goodness that exists within it. Part of our editorial philosophy at 1000 Libraries is to surface heartwarming stories - to remind people that humanity is capable of extraordinary kindness and beauty. That is not naïvety. It is a deliberate choice to focus on what deserves amplifying.

What excites me most is that this work allows me not only to dream of a better world, but to actually do something about it. To inspire people to be kind. To value generosity, learning, empathy. Fifty per cent of our publishing arm’s profits go directly to support literacy programmes in underserved communities. Last year, we built a school library in Laos in partnership with KPMG, the French government and IRD. We donate to local literacy champions who are doing extraordinary work on the ground. That is the part that keeps me grounded - and the part that makes me feel this dream has real weight beneath it.

“Impact” is a word that can carry many different, even opposing meanings. To you, what does it mean, and how have you been creating the kind of impact you truly believe in?

To me, positive impact means making people better off. 1000 Libraries’ mission is simple: to inspire people to visit libraries and bookstores, and to promote book culture in all its forms.

Lately, we have been thinking deeply about the dangers of our increasingly digital life, and our editorial strategy has become unapologetically centred on promoting a wider analog lifestyle. On a personal level, I want my children, my nieces and nephews, to grow up in a world where books still exist, and where kindness is a valued currency. I want them to know there is more to a professional life than the pursuit of economic gain, that a good life should include some measure of contribution to the world beyond yourself. That is how I try to lead both my life and my company.

Many businesses eventually have to face a choice between commercial success and community impact. How do you see this dynamic?

We do not separate the two. 1000 Libraries has never been about making money, and I believe that is precisely why it has been commercially successful.

Our community knows that most of what the online media we produce is entirely free to access, and that we are a small team driven by love rather than profit margins. When we do generate commercial success, it comes from the trust and support of our community - through our books and products, which are designed to be beautiful, thoughtful, and unlike anything else on the market. They are an extension of our philosophy: to do good, and to do it with exceptional craft.

I know this is not a conventional way to think about business. But it is who we have been since the beginning. I believe there is an extraordinary power in building an online community through honesty and kindness. Over the years, I have had many people approach us wanting to heavily commercialise our audience, and I have always declined categorically. Our priority is to delight our community with stories. Revenue is a consequence, not a goal.

As someone who reads widely and has a deep reverence for storytelling, what do you think about AI - especially now that we are living with it, and the risk of it weaving stories rather than truly telling them is becoming increasingly clear?

AI is a topic I have spent a great deal of time thinking about. I studied it in depth during my philosophy studies, particularly the ethics of it, well before the emergence of ChatGPT and the current wave of generative tools.

But in the space where we operate, there is not much room for AI. We are people who celebrate analog things - human creativity, human interaction, human presence. And I believe that as AI becomes more widely adopted and begins to shape our daily lives, what will endure is precisely what it cannot replicate: good, honest writing from people who have truly lived; great design that defies trends; and most importantly, the irreplaceable warmth of human connection.

I would much rather walk into a bookstore and speak with a bookseller about a book that has moved me than ask an algorithm for the bestseller list. And the fact that bookstores and libraries continue to thrive - that they are full of people, and that there are individuals who will accept modest wages simply because they love this work - is, to me, one of the most encouraging and inspiring signs for the future of humanity.

AI can be useful for certain things. But I do not believe it will ever replicate what makes us special: our imagination, our creativity, the singular way each of us sees the world. Part of the appeal of reading - of all storytelling - is that it came from a particular mind with a particular way of seeing. That is irreplaceable.

Speaking of storytelling and impact, perhaps we should also touch on the power of media. What do you think about the role of the media today? And how can we ensure that the right stories are told, rather than being drowned out by all the noise?

Storytelling is foundational to who we are as a species. It is how humanity has learned since its very beginning - gathered around fires, listening to someone make meaning from experience. We learn from teachers, from authors, from filmmakers. We are, in the most essential sense, creatures who live off stories.

Media has the power to steer the world in one direction or another - toward fear, or toward compassion and positive inspiration. We are in the business of the latter. In a world that feels increasingly divided, telling stories about other people is how we cultivate empathy and compassion - and therefore how we might work together toward a better future for our children.

Media has the extraordinary power to shape culture, and that is exactly what we are trying to do. We want book culture not just to survive, but to flourish. And as it turns out, most book people tend to be remarkably kind. So in celebrating them, we find ourselves also inspiring kindness.

We do not pretend to do more than that. But I think the world sometimes needs a gentle reminder of what is good in humanity. And if we can consistently offer that reminder, then I believe our work is well done.

“Rage-bait” was nominated by Oxford as a word of 2025. It captures how easily anger can be manufactured and turned into noise. However, when I heard your story about Mr Mohamed Aziz, the bookseller who spent more than fifty years fighting illiteracy in Morocco, I found myself thinking about a different kind of anger - one that comes from genuine care and the urge to turn the wheel and make something right. Did you feel something similar when you created 1000 Libraries? If so, where do you think that kind of rage might take you - and the project - in the future?

Meeting Mr Mohamed Aziz a few years ago was life-changing for me, and his story remains one of the most meaningful we have ever told, with nearly 1M likes. Encounters like that awaken a particular kind of urgency - not the noisy, performative anger of the internet, but a quieter and more moral force: the desire to protect what is precious and to make something right. A feeling of injustice…

I think many of us who care deeply about humanity and culture are shaped by such moments. For Mr Aziz, that force came from being denied the education he longed for. For me, it comes from a different but related place. I came from humble beginnings. I was neurodivergent, often misunderstood, sometimes discriminated against, even bullied, and for much of my life, books were my refuge in a world that did not always know what to do with someone like me.

Many people in our community know that feeling. They carry a sadness, or an anger, at being unseen, misunderstood. What 1000 Libraries has done - in some small but meaningful way - is create a place where those people can belong. A place where being sensitive, curious, bookish and kind is not something to hide, but something to celebrate.

So yes, there is a kind of “anger” beneath this project. But I hope it is an anger that has been transmuted into kindness and action. It drives me to help children who do not yet have access to books. To build community for people who feel different. To encourage young people not to remain trapped in lives that do not fit them. My goal in life has never been to seek extraordinary wealth. I want to do honest work that matters. And if 1000 Libraries can keep turning pain, difference and longing into beauty, opportunity and belonging, then that is where I hope this force will continue to take us.

Thank you so much for sharing all of this with us.

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