Books for Looks

  • Posted: November 10, 2009 at 11:29 AM
  • By Nick Olsen

Hi folks! Long time no blog—remember me? I knew I'd really dropped the ball when I read this from a friend:

"Honey, your Dream House is turning into a recurring nightmare; one where I keep checking for updates and keep getting disappointed."

Oops. Though I must say, while this house has fallen victim to neglect, the tenement of my dreams is looking spiffier than ever! And more than a year-and-a-half after moving in I finally unpacked my massive (and massively heavy) collection of illustrated books. Mugatu says it and I'm going to second: Nothing makes a home feel cozier than books. Which leads me to today's central question: Does it matter if you haven't read all of them? ANY of them?

I'll admit I own a few coffee table books that I've never even cracked, or books I bought at the flea market just for the cover and couldn't tell you the author or title. But the books I've really read and enjoyed over and over? Penguin paperbacks. An acutely observant editor friend noticed a recent trend in shelter mags in which decorators/stylists are turning books around on the shelves so you can't see the spines. So now we can add "book shame" to the list of subcategories to status anxiety!

Bookcase Paxil comes in the form of Strand's books-by the-foot offering, but depending on how much cash you shell out, the look reads more "Bad Public Libary," chock full of 10-year old bestsellers, as E.F. pointed out. He shudders at turning books into accessories; I'm as torn as an old dust jacket because I appreciate their aesthetic, individually and en masse.

So where do you stand on the books-for-looks debate?

Tags: books, decorating dilemmas, libraries, Strand bookstore

Nick Olsen Interior decorator, extreme do-it-yourself-er, fantasist.

Comments

Good-looking but bad for you

By: Anon | Thu, 12/10/2009 - 11:10

The trouble with covering books in white, arranging them by color, turning them inward, etc., is that it looks so good, but feels so wrong.

Loved the book on the blog.

By: home before dark | Wed, 12/09/2009 - 11:49

Loved the book on the blog. If I remember correctly one NYC reader in the book uses her never used (we hope) oven to store excess books! I love books. My husband and I both were English majors and we have BOOKS! I have read most of them. Some I have bought for reference. Some I have bought for future reading. Yes, I confess, some were bought for the beauty of their covers and spines. I have three copies of Madame Bovary for that very reason. My dining room has flanking shelves that I have used to display china, but am in the process of turning this room into more of a library. I detest books turned inwards. Ditto for covering in white paper. The idea of color blocking a bookcase strikes me as the definition of insipid. However, having said all of that, I live in a university community. Having your intelligence assessed by what is displayed on your bookshelves can often be called extreme sport. Members of the Academy have serious rules for this! Tends to bring out my oppositional, prankster side at times.

I think books-for-looks is

By: Matthew74 | Tue, 11/17/2009 - 00:39

I think books-for-looks is perfectly acceptable--within reason. The spine-in look is completely stupid, especially when decorators cover them with white book covers to give that uniform all-white look.

However, books can be great conversation starters, and you can really learn a lot about people by their reactions to your books. When I'm having people over for a soiree, I like to leave out Judith Krantz's "Scruples," or true crime classics such as "Hold Hands and Die."

I mean, really, why not?

First off, thank heaven.

By: Mrs. Blandings | Fri, 11/13/2009 - 20:32

Nick - I was missing you dreadfully. I love books. That being said, I do have a few on my shelves that I haven't read, but I feel our time isn't right just yet. Books as props makes my skin crawl a bit, but I have a feeling there would be other traits that would tell me that I would not likely be friends with the spines in crowd.

All that being said, I've bought a book or two for the cover. Sometimes it's looks over substance.

Ditch the books

By: Bromeliad | Fri, 11/13/2009 - 14:15

Would never keep a book around that I don't read because I need room for the books I do read. Exception - really pretty hefty books that double as furniture.

Books read and unread

By: clwho | Thu, 11/12/2009 - 21:10

Two comments on the books question - to me it doesn't matter what they are. My grandmother is an avid reader of Harlequin romance novels, and when she still lived in her house she owned perhaps not just yards but miles of them. What's funny is that if you weren't thinking about what they were, her shelves filled with them were rather lovely - they're perfectly uniform in height and depth, almost uniform in thickness, and very colorful and bright. She was never embarrassed about keeping them and letting anyone in her house see them - she read them, enjoyed them, and didn't particularly care about what anyone else thought about their literary merit. And I'm with her on that - if you read it, you might as well own up to it.

My current digs are fairly small - 800 square feet - and my bookcases are a random collection of shelving units that each accomodate books of different sizes - that means my book storing plan is driven wholly by practicality - books that fit in specific bookcases live in specific places. My decent-sized collection of cookbooks is in the dining room in the bookshelf that fits tall and heavy volumes; most of the paperback novels are in the bedroom in two shelving units that are friendlier for smaller books. I don't really care what's where; I mostly just get annoyed if I can't find something, but any reasonable organizing principle doesn't play nice with my motley collection of bookshelves. So they live where they live.

hoarding

By: chadwick_glocke... | Wed, 11/11/2009 - 17:18

I don't think that it really matters, but I do think it is slightly disingenuous. Since I seem to suffer from a bag lady-like paper addition that doesn’t allow me to dispose of any book or periodical, I am more concerned with hiding low-brow airport paperbacks and self help titles in out of the way places. I realized I had a problem when I considered storing cookbooks in my microwave.

Have to say this has never

By: Anon. | Tue, 11/10/2009 - 19:47

Have to say this has never been a huge problem for me. I am a voracious reader and am physically unable to buy a book without reading it. And, as that I studiously ignore the maxim to "never judge a book by its cover," I tend to purchase rather pretty books, anyway.

However, as a moral question, I'd say it's all a matter of comfort. I agree that I don't think I could feel at home surrounded by books whose only connection to me is that we share an apartment. However, if you prefer to view your tomes as pieces of visual art instead of literary art, no one should shame you for it.

Books and Rudeness

By: Anon | Tue, 11/10/2009 - 17:29

Another book anxiety: If I put a bunch of beautiful art/photography books out on the coffee table, my lovely boyfriend will plop himself down on the sofa and sit there reading them. Sorry, Mugs, but that's just too cozy. I don't want guests to use my living room for READING. I want them to admire me, or, failing that, at least simulate conversation. I guess I could put out bound volumes of the Federal Tax Code or something.

If I went to someone's house,

By: AlCracka | Tue, 11/10/2009 - 14:12

If I went to someone's house, asked them how they liked some of their books, and then learned they hadn't read most of them, I would be weirded out. BUT: that's never happened to me. Has it really ever happened to anyone? I feel like this might be more of an urban legend than anything else.

That said, my bookshelf is an ongoing and exhaustively thought-out process. When I was younger, books like the collected works of Keats stayed on the Showoff Shelf (more centrally positioned), even though deep down I knew I barely even read it in college. Now it's been relegated to the Other Bookshelf, replaced by crap I actually read recently. (Reason: now I'm really into reading Ovid, so I look like a pretentious douche either way.)