It might sound implausible for someone to claim they can list the 2,500 books that have most shaped them. But the English artist and set designer Es Devlin insists she can.

There are the titles she studied as an English literature major, she said, and the books and plays she has absorbed over some 30 years of designing sets — first for increasingly prestigious theaters, then for the likes of U2, Adele and Beyoncé.

ImageEs Devlin’s “Library of Us,” on the beach in Miami, in front of the Faena Hotel. The illuminated installation, stacked with 4,200 books, was designed as an invitation to visitors to sit, read and think.Credit...Oriol Tarridas

These days, she added, there were “probably about three or four hundred books a year to be read” for her new projects alone.

“It may not be that I read it cover to cover,” she said of the books that she reads during a conversation in late October, as she stood amid thousands of volumes in a warehouse in industrial New Jersey.

“My reading process is quite specific,” she continued. “I’ll be halfway through one, pick up a different one. I quite like the cross-fertilization — the association that happens between various books on the go.”

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