Books Are Meant For Reading
When you look at editorials in Architectural Digest, the homes of the rich and famous all have a common theme to them: they make these people look better than they really are. Their shelves are full of neatly appointed books, their taste in art is sophisticated and passion for cooking is embodied in a designer kitchen where only the wine cooler seems to be in regular use. Except that’s not really true and everything you see was made up by a paid professional who is supposed to make their client look good: a Mario Bellini sofa, French chandeliers or cool coffee table books.
There are little details that trigger my gag reflex, like the Tom Ford coffee table book that’s all the rage in the interiors of the stylish set right now. It’s often used as a coaster for fancy scented candles and vases full of flowers which makes the former redundant. But hey, it looks good.
You can’t afford a Tom Ford suit but at least you can afford his book that’s meant to just sit there as a piece of decor. Maybe you’ll leaf through it but that’s not the point of having it. They’re supposed to be seen because they’re a status symbol. Or the proof your attention span isn’t big enough to read serious literature like Crime and Punishment. And that’s because show-off books are a crime worth a punishment.
An another crime worth a punishment is color-blocking on bookshelves. You’re no Barnett Newman or Ellsworth Kelly, so better leave color-blocking in the hands of masters of abstract expressionism. It’s just an another form of turning books into something they’re not.
There are ways to organize your private library that make it easier to navigate them: according to genre or style. I have my own personal system where there’s an extensive shelf dedicated to poetry and it’s about to collapse. Owning and physically touching a book can’t be compared to computer screens. But the ick level is never too high and this ornamental approach to books proves it.
The low point must be one of those side-effects to trends like minimalism, where people go to extreme measures to reduce their space to the bare essentials, going so far to peel off the labels off spice containers to make everything look more “balanced”. The slap in your face here is seeing books with their spines either turned to the back or torn off. I feel silly that it even needs to be said, but obviously there’s no other way: books are not decor. They aren’t there just to be admired or blend in with your cream-colored furniture and organic cotton blankets.
Books are like music: they inform your identity, shape your values and your world view. The absence of it does that too and it’s usually to recognize. People aren’t stupid, they just don’t have the experience or opportunity to discover the immense benefits of reading. In education, there’s a need for a revolution in teaching literature because it’s easier to plagiarise someone else’s hard work than steal candy from kids. And if you’re in the difficult position of having to work with students like that, you’re fighting a losing battle. That’s why teachers will always be underpaid since they keep fighting something that’s bigger than themselves. They don’t have the luxury of giving up because someone needs to do it.
But if you let Oprah Winfrey shape your reading lists, you don’t need teachers or schools anyway. That’s what the metaverse has been telling us from the very start. Spirituality has been rebranded as optimisation and education as skills. It makes you want to give up and become a digital nomad doing IT work from a beach bar in Goa.
The hashtags are just too tempting and it looks good on Instagram. When you flip the coin you see decaying cancer patients putting on a brave face in their Instagram videos. It makes you numb to pain and joy because you can’t multitask all the time and time is of the essence. Books provide focus on lessons we didn’t learn and makes us focus on a different kind of rabbit hole, something that rather resembles Plato’s cave.
In 2007, I had the privilege of visiting the Austrian abbey of Melk which is also the home of a breathtaking baroque library filled to the brim with a priceless collection of books and works of art, like the frescoes adorning the ceilings or the ornate, gilded shelves. We were students and one should be of the age where you can truly appreciate the value of this. Unless you’re the proverbial nerd.
In that case you’ll always be more interested in art than girls and alcohol. And your mind will be milking the fruits of this experience for years. I still remember the sound of my shoes walking across the marble floor at the library with the velvet ropes keeping us on a safe distance from the bookshelves. And this might be the right time to go back to refresh and re-stock my memory of it for the future.
Here, every book is worth a prominent place on your coffee table due to its historical significance, but not as a damn coaster for a Dyptique candle. The rich history of Catholic abbeys includes scriptoriums where skilled monks were copying manuscripts that are nowadays on display in museums as a testimony of the pre-Gutenberg civilisation that went to great lengths to preserve knowledge and turn it into an art form.
They were in a privileged position due to the fact that it was mostly members of the Church who could read or write, which also enabled control over the transfer and span of knowledge that trickled to the masses increasingly over time. Especially when vernacular language replaced Latin in the liturgy and the barrier between the messager and the recipient of the gospel disappeared. In turn, this opened significant space for new interpretation.
The current business of books accommodates to the needs and weaknesses of the modern reader. There are those infamous blurbs that try to compress 900 pages into paragraph that is supposed to lure you into reading it. And then they add a few quotes from critics or mention literary awards. It’s all about marketing. We have come a long way from the humble, anonymous monk with a bottle of ink and a parchment of paper to success stories like Sally Rooney who mutated from a writer into a brand.
Fortunately, chic coffee table books don’t fall under the jurisdiction of woke crusaders, since there’s hardly anything worth canceling inside. The German publisher Taschen sells Sumo, dedicated to Helmut Newton’s work which is so big that it comes with a stand to support its size. It’s the Birkin bag of coffee table books with a pricetag of 20000 Euros.
If they are already getting so obese, why not follow in the prophetic footsteps of Seinfeld’s Cosmo Kramer? He created one with built-in legs to do double duty as a coffee table. Unlike Sumo it’s cheap and it’s equally famous as his portrait painted by Jerry’s girlfriend Nina. Many are the pearls of wisdom you can harvest from tv’s most famous hipster doofus. I’d keep him away from priceless prints at the library in Melk.
There’s actually no need to worry: if Seinfeld is anything to go by he’s more likely to go to the abbey only to look for a toilet. Presumably dressed up as the new abbot, father Martin Van Nostrand. I bet that one would be a hoot. We’ll have to wait for Hollywood to un-cancel Richards before that happens though. But one can dream.
