Miami -
What’s the purpose of a book? It’s obvious, right? Or is it?
Books in our personal libraries have been read, will be read, or may never be read. So be it. Books provide comfort and context, help us frame, ask, and maybe even answer good questions, deliver lessons and inspirations, and challenge our assumptions on the bumpy road to discernment, critical thinking, and wisdom. And wisdom born of most books can help us fight the ignorant, reactionary tribalism that has relegated our national dialogue to the dumpster.
Books are collected, too, be they the rare, antiquarian fare featured in the 2019 documentary “The Booksellers” or graphic novels, comic books, and manga. Yes, with an open mind, you can find excellent stories, characters, and artwork in those genres, too. Books like travel are supposed to open minds.
Books are produced, exhibited, and sold by non-publishing businesses to help build and extend their brands. Simon Chilvers wrote in the February 24-25 FT Weekend of the commercial symbiosis between books and fashion. Saint Laurent, for example, has just opened a Paris bookshop that includes volumes from its own Rive Droits Editions imprint. Comme des Garçons is launching a book space, as well, called Librairie 1909 in Paris.
This is not necessarily a new development, either, since Chanel opened the 7L bookshop in Paris in 1999, which houses the-late-Karl Lagerfeld's library of 33,000 volumes. Take that, Umberto Eco (see Part One of this essay). The very interesting Sarah Andelman, who first came to my attention recently on Monocle Radio, has opened a bookish "Mis en Page" pop-up in Paris' Le Bon Marché department store focused on the act of reading. The installation includes artworks about books, book readings and signings, and merchandise from Tokyo's Cow Books and New York's Strand.
Books are also used to populate living and working spaces without any pretense that the owners and users have read them or will do so. The FT Weekend’s superb architecture critic Edwin Heathcote fittingly addresses the idea in the February 10-11 edition that books serve design and décor purposes from, as he wrote, "social media shelfies to Zoom backgrounds to hyperinflated coffee-table tomes." Books certainly provided a comforting backdrop in our room at a recent stay in San Diego as they do at The Betsy in this town.
Heathcote continued, "The use of books as décor is hardly new," referencing the philosopher Montaigne. He was worried his works would become nothing more than objects that "lay in a parlor window." Heathcote says that not even Montaigne could imagine "how awash our world would become with books that no one is expected to read - from faux-cozy cafes and bars to oversized, overpriced hotel suites where they're employed in a desperate attempt to fill all that space."
"Indeed," Heathcote wrote, "there is an entire industry supplying books as pure décor" because, well, "books convey an authenticity that other applied finishes do not. The knowledge they are filled with, the words and ideas they contain, give them a depth with which even the finest hand-blocked or gold wallpaper cannot compete." These are not his views, but ... yikes.
Say what? Books as mere props in somebody’s designscape? Is this a problem? I actually don't think so. Part One of this essay considered the question and even the benefits of not having read every book in your personal library. But what about having read none of them in these kind of literary Potemkin villages? "Relax, Francis," as Sergeant Hulka (Warren Oates) said to Psycho (Conrad Dunn) in the movie “Stripes” (1981). The presence of books coupled in a designed space with artwork, furnishings, and mementoes can nonetheless conjure a life well lived if not one well examined.
At least books are present in these situations, which comes from somebody here who grew up in a house without books. Curiosity might just infect somebody to thumb through if not read one of more of those items of décor one of these days. The presence of books in any capacity is better than no books at all ... and certainly preferable to banning and burning books.
Books at the Fairmont Grand Del Mar, San Diego.