At the Hungry Minds pop-up bookstore, open through July 27 at 2 Rivington Street in Manhattan, the first thing visitors see is nothing; then they see everything. After their eyes adjust from the summer haze to the jewel-toned interior, antiques, plush botanicals, and dizzying stacks of books fill their view—or, rather, stacks of a single book.
Hungry Minds is first and foremost an indie publisher, though many visitors to the pop-up on its grand opening the evening of July 9 did not immediately realize it. Lining the walls in navy and silver, tangling as they ascend with a strata of steampunk ceiling hangings, are countless copies of Hungry Minds’ flagship coffee table book, The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization. Weighing in at more than four pounds, The Book contains 400-plus pages of human inventions, including the prehistoric (fire), the modern (molecular gastronomy), and the abstract (“rite of passage”), broken down into text and speculative diagrams. A later section called “Art” forgoes words entirely, in favor of interpretive illustration.
Founded by Vsevolod “Seva” Batishchev and Timur Kadyrov, the Hungry Minds collective published The Book in 2022, after raising over $3 million with the help of Artur Stelmakh, a crowdfunding veteran. Hungry Minds has since released a collector’s edition, in December 2024, as well as playing cards, a puzzle, stickers, and bookmarks. The Book goes for $119 on the publisher’s site (or $139 for the gift edition), with more than 300,000 copies sold.
Seva and Kadyrov are both entrepreneurs and artists. Seva said that it was a natural progression for them to turn their flagship title into a physical space, saying the pop-up is a testament to the “automatic process of transforming the reality around us” that, to him, defines humanity. Prior to Hungry Minds, Seva worked with Kadyrov’s global escape rooms business; they are both also longtime members of the Burning Man community, for which Kadyrov has worked on art installations.
The duo enlisted the help of local designers to bring the Soho pop-up to life. Among them were florist Orli Levine-Rozenvayn, who aimed to evoke “nature reclaiming its place” among the industrial fixtures. Roxana Kadyrova, Timur’s sister, designed the space and curated the antiques, which included brass fish and a desktop model of the solar system. Kadyrova said she hopes to see more publishers render their stories in three dimensions, noting that books are already “imaginary spaces.”
Hungry Minds considers itself to be not just a publisher but a purveyor of an experience. Seva said The Book aims to evoke the wonder he felt as a child, tinkering with kinetic toys and mechanisms. “When you’re a kid...there were no problems, there were just dreams,” he said. “The Book is our gentle way to remind you that the world is still amazing, and it was built by humans. It’s not about knowledge, to be honest.”
With ambitions to stake out pop-ups worldwide, Hungry Minds also has two follow-up books on the horizon. The upcoming The Last Book (formerly Anthem to Humankind) has raised more than $400,000 in crowdfunding between Kickstarter and Indiegogo. It will tell the story of a fictional apocalypse survivor through illustrated diary entries—a narrative intimacy that Kadyrov hopes will help readers connect with the existential questions that The Book introduced. Further out, The Black Book, which has raised more than $500,000 on Kickstarter, will extend the steampunk encyclopedia genre to inventions that were lost or crushed by history, such as arboreal architecture.
