People have always used books to assert their sophistication and affluence. You need only visit the library of a National Trust property to see that. The novelist F Scott Fitzgerald famously critiqued the shallowness of the super-rich via his character, Jay Gatsby, who lined his shelves with books in order to project a cultured image of himself – yet they were “uncut” and had never been read.
To one guest at Gatsby’s party, that doesn’t matter – he describes the shelves (that he had at first assumed to be cardboard facades of books) as “a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too – didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”
A century on from The Great Gatsby’s publication, it is once again fashionable to decorate using books – and to question the motives of those who do so. In Vincenzo Latronico’s International Booker-shortlisted Perfection, a novel that highlights the hollowness of chasing a “cool”, “curated” life, Anna and Tom’s self-consciously chic flat features “floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with paperbacks and graphic novels … interspersed with illustrated coffee-table books – monographs on Noorda and Warhol, Tufte’s series on infographics, the Taschen history of typefaces, and another Taschen on the entryways of Milan,” carefully arranged with “succulents in cement plant pots,” and “a waist-level camera” in the place of bookends.
Through their home, Latronico writes, the couple has created a picture of a life that is “clear and purposeful” – whether or not that is actually the case.
In an age of constant scrolling, there is social capital to be gained by simply looking as if you are a cultured person who listens to music on vinyl and reads lots of books. And creating an aesthetically pleasing bookshelf is now easier than ever, thanks to an increase in booksellers who trade in “books by the metre”.
Vintage volumes are particularly popular, as they offer an instant way to create the effect of a long-established library made up of books collected over many years. “My bookshelf is now complete,” reads one customer review on an eBay listing for a metre’s worth of “randomly selected” antique titles, available for £50.
Dayna Isom Johnson, a trend expert at Etsy, another website where some sellers offer books by the metre, says the company has “seen a 19,616% increase in searches for book-lover decor” over the past three months, compared with the same time last year.
If you’re willing to pay a bit more, sellers will offer a more bespoke service: for example, for £98, the online shop Country House Library will sell you a metre of assorted vintage books that all have orange covers.
Madeleine Ovenden is head of non-traditional sales at the publisher Thames & Hudson, which specialises in what might be referred to as “coffee-table books”. She has seen an increase in interior designers wanting to bulk-buy books with spines in similar colours, “to fit a room theme”. The company now sells bundles of coffee-table books that all fit a certain colour or aesthetic – a stack of lemon-yellow Thames & Hudson books, for instance, could be yours for £119.90.
Customers will also come to the publisher directly, Ovenden says, with “requests by the metre for certain shelf sizes”.
The rise in such requests can be attributed to the popularity of the “bookshelf wealth” interior design trend on TikTok – an extension of the “quiet luxury” and “stealth wealth” aesthetic. A bookshelf that looks like an heirloom family collection, complete with art and ornaments, suggests you care about literature and art – and have time and money to spend on these things.
Philip Blackwell curates bookshelves for a living via his company, Ultimate Library, which is used by hotels, businesses and homeowners who want to outsource the task of filling up their bookshelves. Though he is critical of the “books by the metre” trend – Ultimate Library’s selling point is that a knowledgable team will work with the client to select books they might actually read – he acknowledges that, if you’re trying to build a library from scratch, you will almost inevitably have a certain amount of space to fill.
I’m speaking to Blackwell at 40 Leadenhall, a newly developed office building in the City of London, where his company was commissioned to create a library for workers to use. “That panel there is 14 linear metres multiplied by 33.” So he and his colleagues have to find 462 metres of books to fill that space, though most will be chosen for more than just their age, size or colour, and will be available to borrow. “Creating a book collection, certainly for a private client, is all about having a discussion, going on a voyage to discover it, and it should be really good fun,” Blackwell says. He likes to quote Cicero: “A room without books is like a body without a soul.” Services like his, then, manufacture that “soul” in places such as offices and hotels that might otherwise be pretty soulless.
Blackwell’s service might be less superficial than simply using books for wall-dressing, but its appeal is still partly down to clients liking the way that books look. Michael Wood, who works for M&G Real Estate, which owns 40 Leadenhall, says M&G approached Ultimate Library partly because “we’ve got a big space in this ground floor to fill and books are a great way to do that”. Aesthetically, the books make the building’s lobby look less stark – and the higher shelves, which feature older books arranged by colour, are wholly ornamental.
“As a decorative element, books are great because they add a lot of texture,” says New York-based interior designer Tommy Landen Huerter. “They add colour in places where it wouldn’t be easy to otherwise integrate it. They just make a home look a lot more lived-in.”
There have “definitely been clients I have bought books for that will probably never be opened”, who want full bookshelves “just for the aesthetic”, he says. He has been asked, for example, to style books on high shelves that homeowners will “never be able to reach”.
That is partly because books look good, but also because of their value as status symbols, Landen Huerter thinks. “It’s like: ‘Look how well-read I am because I have the time to read and I’m educated enough to know these topics.’” The designer himself has “a weird insecurity” over the fact that visitors to his own home wouldn’t know he reads, since he does so exclusively on an e-reader and therefore doesn’t have any physical books on display. Through your home, “you want to show your interests” he says – but you can also show what you would like people to think your interests are, which is the impulse behind clients asking him to buy books in bulk for ornamental purposes. “I can understand why people would say: ‘I haven’t read 100 books in the last year, but I would like to have.’” Just as they do via social media or through clothing choices, people are often trying to present the version of themselves that they would like to be true, rather than what actually is.
Presenting the image of being a book lover has never been easier – part of the reason that buying books by length has become a trend is that books can be bought very cheaply, says Matt Hubbard, owner of secondhand bookshop Halcyon Books in south-east London. In the UK and the US at least (the market is slightly less populated in continental Europe), books are published in huge quantities: “We’re definitely spoiled for having a hell of a lot of books around.”
Hubbard says he could easily take on more books than he would be able to sell, and some “tatty paperbacks” have such a low value that they end up getting recycled. There is a “sort of a rag trade side of the book business”, where books are bought by weight and sold on “very cheaply” by retailers such as Amazon, eBay and World of Books. This has “hugely depressed the prices” of a lot of secondhand books, he says.
Selling books by the metre, then, is a savvy way for retailers to get rid of large numbers of titles that would otherwise be difficult to shift.
It’s not without its downsides, though. “It promotes this overconsumption of things that don’t really have meaning, that are just for the aesthetic,” says Landen Huerter. The interior designer worries about the rise of “fast-fashion trends” in home decor, similar to what has happened in the clothing industry. When people start to feel they need to follow new trends and constantly change their homes, it creates “a new level of waste and overconsumption”, which “gets away from the whole idea of having a collected and curated space of things that represent yourself, your story and your interests,” he says.
Buying books by length allows people to create a kind of “knock-off” version of a richly filled bookshelf put together over years of reading for people who “can’t be bothered to choose the books and read them,” Hubbard says – or who can’t afford a service like Blackwell’s, perhaps.
It is easy to be snobby about people who fill their bookshelves in this way – but “we’ve all got lots of books on our shelves that we haven’t read,” Hubbard points out. In Japan, they even have a word – tsundoku – for acquiring books with the best of intentions but letting them pile up without reading them.
Though it’s obviously frustrating for true bibliophiles when someone has bought a random selection of books in bulk to decorate their home, the fact there are books in their home at all is a good thing, Blackwell thinks. Having books around means that, at the very least, the opportunity to read one is there.
“In my experience”, he says, “there is always the right time and the right place to read a book.”