Jack Edwards is the internet’s resident librarian, sharing book recommendations on TikTok which influence his millions of fans and are singlehandedly shaping the reading habits of a generation (Provided by Jack Edwards, 2025)
His is a name synonymous with the BookTok movement, an internet sub-community which has become so influential that it has the power to catapult authors to the top of the literary charts. Yet, when I meet Jack Edwards in The Library Bar at The Lanesborough, he’s somehow low-key and surprisingly humble.
‘I’m actually somewhat a caricature of myself,’ he tells me with a laugh. He’s not wrong; he’s dressed in a crisp white button-up tucked into black slacks, giving him the air of a man who just stepped out of a Bloomsbury townhouse. He greets me warmly, before a special edition of Dior’s We Should All Be Feminists momentarily steals his attention. It’s hardly coincidental that he resembles a spoof of the literary figures he gushes over online.
Self-proclaimed as the ‘internet’s resident librarian,’ the Brighton-born 26-year-old now commands an audience of 3.5 million followers with whom he shares book recommendations online. The hashtag BookTok, which houses over 63 million videos, is a community dedicated entirely to reading, and Jack is often recognised as its figurehead. Among those books catapulted into popularity thanks to the BookTok movement and its influencers? Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, Casey McQuiston’s Red White and Blue and Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, to name a few.