Digest: Bookshelf edition
All this talk of e-books has me thinking about the possible decline of the bookshelf.
Russell Smith a few weeks back wrote about this very topic:
Book-walls are just aesthetic now, just an unusually dense wallpaper: We don’t really need them for consultation. I can probably find the complete text of most of them online within an hour. It’s the same for CDs: If you have the time to copy them all, you can throw them all away and buy music online for the rest of your life. In the future, we will live in ever-smaller houses with ever-larger TV screens, so you need all the wall-space you have. And all our books will be invisible, like our music: The sum total of our literary experience will be a list of file names on a grey plastic machine in a briefcase.
But of course, the bookshelf isn’t dead yet and there are still some stunning examples of bookshelf as art/decor/inspiration out there.
Design Sponge points us to artist Jane Mount’s gorgeous series of illustrations of people’s ideal bookshelves.
The one below speaks to me current fascination with whales and also has a bunch of books I quite love.
I’m also very fond of this one and
Of course, like Smith argues in his column, what we choose to display (and how we do it) can reveal a lot about ourselves. The New Yorker’s great books blog, the Book Bench, has a regular feature that psychoanalyzes people through their shelves.
Frankly, all this talk of the death of the bookshelf might be a bit premature. If Apartment Therapy can devote countless blog posts to the devilish problem of showing off all your books and refer to them as “the original modular furniture” (how trendy, how moderne) then I think we’ll be stuck with cheap Billy bookcases for a bit longer.
Leave a Reply