Nikki Igol wanted to open a public library. Whenever her artist friends visited her Brooklyn apartment, they would get lost in her collection of 2,500 magazines and art books that she had been building since childhood.
“They always left finding exactly what they needed,” she said.
When one day last year she ran into Steven Chaiken, whom she had not seen since they worked together at the fashion magazine V in the mid-aughts, an idea began to take shape.
Over coffee at the Odeon, they caught up on everything that had happened since they worked together over a decade ago: Mr. Chaiken had co-founded the buzzy artist management agency SN37; Ms. Igol had worked as a professional archivist and researcher at VFiles, the design firm Baron & Baron and for the makeup powerhouse Pat McGrath.
During their intern days, they remembered, the entire V office would crowd around the desk of whoever had the latest copy of French Vogue.
“We started in magazines when digesting print was a shared cultural experience,” Mr. Chaiken said. “Now everyone is siloed off on Instagram.”
He added: “We were both drawn to the concept of building that sort of experience and community around print and image discovery.”
The pair was standing in the venture that came about as a result of their reminiscing: Library180, a vast corner suite on the 26th floor of 180 Maiden Lane, a building in the Financial District among the WSA properties with sweeping views of the East River and Brooklyn Heights.
White bookshelves lining the walls contain treasures that would delight all who share Mr. Chaiken and Ms. Igol’s love of printed matter. Kurt Cobain in a baby-doll dress on the cover of The Face. The singers Boy George and Marilyn goofing around in black-and-white on the front of an Annie Flanders-era Details from June 1985. A doe-eyed model in a white lace dress and bubble gum pink head scarf gazes out from a January 1964 issue of Vogue.
Nearby, on this particular June afternoon, a V.H.S. of the 1995 documentary “Catwalk” played on a tiny TV. Parker Posey’s librarian character in “Party Girl” would be in heaven.
Like the public library Ms. Igol envisioned, Library180 is open to anyone who wants to come by, though visits are by appointment only. Ms. Igol, usually with her wire fox terrier Meeshu in tow, will be on hand to guide visitors and assist with free scanning. Visitors don’t need to request a specific periodical beforehand; stumbling on something unexpected is encouraged.
“So much image research is now digitally driven by the algorithm, which is getting increasingly good at serving you exactly what you want,” Mr. Chaiken, 39, said.
“And sometimes what you ask for is not what you need to see,” Ms. Igol, 42, added. “It’s a self-discovery thing as well — you have to go out and start developing your aesthetic and shaping your eye.”
The design of the space nods to the pair’s editorial origins at 11 Mercer St., the onetime location of V’s offices, where “all the furniture was stark white with red accents,” Ms. Igol recalled. Guests at Library180 can curl up on modular, tomato-red Kartell seats or roll around on Vyper stools.
“It’s light and airy and refreshing,” says Cecilia Dean, the pair’s former boss and a co-founder of V. “Kind of the opposite of my traditional notion of a wood-paneled room lined with dusty books.”
Ms. Igol’s personal collection, which she describes as “pop to postmodern,” forms the basis of the archive. There are familiar titles like near-complete runs of Interview and V and deep cuts like Tiwimuta, a short-lived object-zine by Ms. Igol’s former boss, the designer Andre Walker.
Fans of niche publications will drool over Blow, a photocopied facsimile of the 1990s fashion magazine, and Coagula Art Journal, an art-world gossip rag from Los Angeles. “I can tell you for a fact that the images within these magazines do not live online,” Ms. Igol said. “If no one’s scanned it, it’s almost like it doesn’t exist.”
A side room separated by red chains is dedicated to more risqué media: bondage teddy bears, Polaroids by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, issues of the German fetish magazine O (which lost a trademark fight with Oprah), and yellowing copies of Screw, Al Goldstein’s sex newspaper from the ’70s and ’80s. (The covers of Screw also appear on the library’s cushions, needle-pointed by Ms. Igol.)
Library180 is something of a tribute to Gallagher’s Paper Collectibles, the now-shuttered shop open from the late 1980s to 2008 where legends like the German fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh could be found leafing through roughly a century’s worth of fashion magazines stuffed inside an East Village basement.
Unlike Gallagher’s or High Valley Books, another holy grail for the fashion set, nothing is for sale at Library180. Ms. Igol and Mr. Chaiken established the space as a nonprofit with the idea that the library will become a living record for the creative community. In September, they hope to begin planning talks and panels related to fashion publishing.
Archival donations have already started rolling in, including the entire run of Visionaire, the conceptual multi-format art publication started by Mr. Chaiken and Ms. Igol’s former bosses at V. Among the donated editions are Visionaire 42 (“Scent”), composed of 21 glass vials of smells, and Visionaire 56 (“Solar”), which contains artwork printed with color-changing inks that react when exposed to the sun.
Nothing at Library180 is behind glass, and no gloves are required to peruse. “I’m happy to tear apart something if someone needs an image in the corner,” Ms. Igol said. “My motto is, ‘I’ll break a spine to get the shot.’”
Perhaps the most precious items at Library180 are Ms. Igol’s first-ever purchases: four early issues of Details from the 1980s, which she bought at age 11 for 50 cents from a garage sale in a Detroit suburb.
“Imagine having Marcus Leatherdale or Bill Cunningham be your introduction to fashion photography,” she sighed. “I didn’t understand what I was seeing. I’ve lived with these for decades, and I never get tired of looking at them.”
As Ms. Igol flipped through “Uncensored,” a sexually provocative 2005 edition of Visionaire, a latex page finally surrendered to time and crumbled in her hands. She shrugged. “These things aren’t mine anymore.”
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