For nearly two decades MOSS was the place where design, art, luxury, and society mixed and mingled. Murray Moss, the impresario behind the concept store and managing partner Franklin Getchell, were the leading arbiters of good taste and the new throughout the 1990s and until the shop shuttered in 2012. Mixing high with low – think eighteenth-century porcelain standing inside museum quality, glass vitrines with 21st-century Tupperware – MOSS shifted the design conversation from the galleries of MoMA to a storefront in SoHo, and was singularly responsible for igniting the careers of international design stars such as Tord Boontje, Maarten Baas, Marcel Wanders, Hella Jongerius, and Monica Castiglioni, among others.

Together, but separately, Moss and Getchell spent two years writing from memory, keeping the deep dark secret stuff to a minimum, and editing their two memoirs into one witty and image heavy handbook. The resulting Please do not touch (and other things you could not do at the design store that changed design) has provided a career intermezzo for the pair, and an inside glance for design aficionados on the world according to MOSS.