Magpie Hats Are Here!

Last year, in an effort to be on my own team, I made a single hat for myself that read: “Magpie Birding Club.” I was surprised by Magpie reader requests for replicas, and an idea was born! Today, I’m thrilled to make these hats available to all my Magpies -– a nod to our community of noticers! Officially join the flock! Shop the hats here.

While working on these hats, I wrote an essay about being “a secretly bad book girl” — someone socialized as a reader from a young age, but secretly insecure in her readerliness. I started to use the term more generally over a couple of additional musings, and the phrase stuck; I now use it to refer to any reader who reads against the grain, which is to say, all of us Magpies with our own preferences and idiosyncrasies. Whether you red lowbrow, read on a Kindle, read slowly, read fast, repeat-read, read things put down as “tripe” or “smut” — whatever it is — keep reading. Go on with your bad book self! Several Magpie readers wrote to request a hat displaying the phrase — so now you can snag a hat to broadcast that sentiment, too. Would make for elite book club swag! (Book club picks here.)

P.S. Maybe the hat can be a part of our collective “Magpie reader signature.”

P.P.S. Life lessons.

P.P.P.S. Everything I ate over the course of a few days. I love diaries like this!