Book Display

Thanks to a very, very generous friend, I am the proud owner of a Kindle. Also courtesy of that very, very generous friend, is this Matthew Yglesias blog post that contemplates one of the very important questions of our time: how do you show off your books when they're all in the same slime white electronic device?

It's an interesting point. Book display always has an aesthetic and socioeconomic component: we want them to make our house look pretty, and we want to impress with our taste and erudition. There are people who have decorators simplyt buy books by the foot in attractive colors and appropriate "heft" to fill the shelves of their McMansions and pied a terres. I even once saw a program on BookTV about a big used book broker with a whole sub-business dedicated to these buyers; it's all just color coded, producing an interesting and, yes, pretty visual tableau with row up on row of red and green and white and so on. For a true reader and booklover, however, such things are a secondary, or even tertiary, concern.

I've often wondered what someone coming into my house and perusing my book collection would think, what insights into my character would they glean from the books overtaking every available space, much to the chagrin of my mother. I like to think they'd come away with the impression of a intelligent, eclectic, and, yes, nerdy person that they, of course, want to bone immediately. (Though on that last point, that very, very generous friend pointed out that the whole "living with your parents" thing would cancel the "bone immediately" thing, and, you know, he's right. But I get my laundry done free!) Who knows?

In certain places, at the behest of my mother for the interests of having a presentable house in which to entertain, aesthetics is a primary concern with book placement. Plus, I do like to keep things somewhat organized and neat for simple ease of reference, if nothing else. The books and the pleasure I derive from them are my central focus, though, far and above those of aesthetics or social display.

Anyway, I'm sure, if the Kindle and other ebook readers become more mainstream and push physical books into a niche market for bibliomaniacs such as myself -- which is not a foregone conclusion IMHO -- we'll come up with other ways of trying to impress people with our choices of reading.