this trend when it comes to books and staging a house...

[butters]

...what's with it? They might show one or two titles, but the majority of the volumes are staged on shelves and tables in stacks with the spines facing away. stupid. Anyone who really enjoys books has those spines front and center, with titles and author right there to select from.

fuckin' posers.

 

[Saint_Ann]

Fucking book snobs.

*nods*

 

[oggbashan]

It is possibly better than buying books by the yard to have behind you for a TV interview.

The late Duke Of Windsor, in his Paris apartment, had a wall of books with boring titles such as 'The proceedings of the accounts society for 1928/9' all arranged by size, not title or category.

My family solicitors have a library of books in every lawyer's office. For the major partners - they are 16th or 17th century and therefore useless. Other senior lawyers have 18th and 19th-century books. The junior ones - 20th-century books. All the collections look good, but for the current legal position, it is all on their laptops.

 

[Sean]

It is possibly better than buying books by the yard to have behind you for a TV interview.

The late Duke Of Windsor, in his Paris apartment, had a wall of books with boring titles such as 'The proceedings of the accounts society for 1928/9' all arranged by size, not title or category.

My family solicitors have a library of books in every lawyer's office. For the major partners - they are 16th or 17th century and therefore useless. Other senior lawyers have 18th and 19th-century books. The junior ones - 20th-century books. All the collections look good, but for the current legal position, it is all on their laptops.

I used to deliver to all the Inns of Court in London. I remember they were refurbing one of the chambers and there was a skip outside just full of 17th and 18th century books. I was so tempted to load up the van with them.

 

[thør]

"Staging a house"?

For Sale?

Nobody gives a shit about what's in the books.

 

[butters]

"Staging a house"?

For Sale?

Nobody gives a shit about what's in the books.

as someone who enjoys books, i still find it insulting it's like saying 'see how good this place looks, with a bespoke reading nook blah-blah-blah' with clearly no interest in books at all.

if i ever walk into a home with books displayed that way, it's clear they're just for props and not for actual consumption, and more about areas of neutrality as the different fonts/colours of the spines might mess with their 'overall presentation'. It annoys me on some deep level, lol.

 

[butters]

a book is not a thing, not some cold object... it's a world of words and ideas, sensations and plots, surprises, vistas, smiles, scares, pleasures. books are a magic carpet on a rainy day.

 

[Sean]

a book is not a thing, not some cold object... it's a world of words and ideas, sensations and plots, surprises, vistas, smiles, scares, pleasures. books are a magic carpet on a rainy day.

A book is a dream you can hold in your hand.

Neil Gaiman

 

[rae121452]

i have to say that i find just as annoying: people who arrange their shelves by the color of the book spine.

 

[butters]

A book is a dream you can hold in your hand.

Neil Gaiman

and a library is collection of alternate realities to dream in

i want a library, a whole room, floor to ceiling bookshelves, big armchairs, and one of those bloody enormous globes to spin and trace historical place names...

*sigh*

and an open wood fire, of course

 

[oggbashan]

I used to deliver to all the Inns of Court in London. I remember they were refurbing one of the chambers and there was a skip outside just full of 17th and 18th century books. I was so tempted to load up the van with them.

They might look good, but as reference works, they had been useless for centuries.

When the UK's Land Registry was established, all the old copies of land transactions became obsolete. When I was helping out in another person's secondhand bookshop I had a builder turn up with a flatbed truck. He had filled his truck with documents from a solicitor's basement. They wanted it emptied so that it could be renovated. He offered the lot to us for £25 if we took it all NOW.

I agreed. The owner was in a public house for his liquid lunch.

All the documents were on parchment and a few dated back to the 15th century, but most were 18th or 19th. Eventually that £25 pounds made the owner several thousand pounds..

 

[Lorilei]

...what's with it? They might show one or two titles, but the majority of the volumes are staged on shelves and tables in stacks with the spines facing away. stupid. Anyone who really enjoys books has those spines front and center, with titles and author right there to select from.

fuckin' posers.

If it's staging for TV, it's a copyright issue.

 

[butters]

If it's staging for TV, it's a copyright issue.

i did not know that! surely it could be got around by more appropriate shots, avoiding close-ups that identify the tomes.... hmmn. So the books whose spines show (now i'm thinking of it) are never really lingered on and you get a brief flash of colour rather than a title

 

[oggbashan]

When they made the movie 84 Charing Cross Road, and the later London stage show, the booksellers of Charing Cross Road lent masses of books as props.

 

[butters]

so i did a quick check (i need to go clean his ma'am's shower stall) and found this article, which kind of confirms my suspicions and shows i'm not alone in it being a bugbear
https://www.today.com/home/backward-books-shelves-controversial-home-decor-trend-t119006

“My book collection is huge so it was important to me from a design standpoint to find a creative way to store my accumulation,” she explained to TODAY Home. “I have read thousands of books. I’ve only reread about 20, so I don’t find it necessary to be able to find a specific title that I’ve already read at the drop of a hat."

The main argument for why designers like this look is that it shows the whites of the pages, creating a cohesive color palette on your bookshelf. “I love the sculptural effect you get by facing the pages out,” Meininger added.

TODAY editor Jen Birkhofer loves the look, too. After seeing it on Instagram this summer, she gave it a try in her own apartment. "I hated how we had so many books, but they were all different colors," she said. "I'd tried to kind of color block them and make them look nice — as Pinterest has shown me — but it just didn’t work. Now that I’ve turned them all around, it matches more with the look of our bedroom and I don’t have to stare at my husband’s maroon copy of 'The Intelligent Investor.' Win, win."

 

[Sean]

so i did a quick check (i need to go clean his ma'am's shower stall) and found this article, which kind of confirms my suspicions and shows i'm not alone in it being a bugbear
https://www.today.com/home/backward-books-shelves-controversial-home-decor-trend-t119006

We call those people "cunts".

 

[oggbashan]

Currently, I have five thousand books, reduced when I downsized houses from 20 to 25,000 plus my shop stock.

I keep those books because I am continually re-reading them. I read about 5 to 8 books a day.

They are sorted into Fiction and non-fiction. The fiction is in alphabetical order of author, and alpha within each author. Non-fiction is by subject and is less sorted, For example, maritime is a block about cargo ships, then liners, then naval, but unsorted within those three groups.

 

[Lorilei]

https://www.jasmine-roth.com/blog/h...really simple answer,in order to display them.

 

[thør]

as someone who enjoys books, i still find it insulting it's like saying 'see how good this place looks, with a bespoke reading nook blah-blah-blah' with clearly no interest in books at all.

if i ever walk into a home with books displayed that way, it's clear they're just for props and not for actual consumption, and more about areas of neutrality as the different fonts/colours of the spines might mess with their 'overall presentation'. It annoys me on some deep level, lol.

If you're looking to buy, you have to look beyond all the gingerbread.....

Otherwise, you're being played.

 

[butters]

i have to say that i find just as annoying: people who arrange their shelves by the color of the book spine.

lol, uhuh

We call those people "cunts".

indeed we do

Currently, I have five thousand books, reduced when I downsized houses from 20 to 25,000 plus my shop stock.

I keep those books because I am continually re-reading them. I read about 5 to 8 books a day.

They are sorted into Fiction and non-fiction. The fiction is in alphabetical order of author, and alpha within each author. Non-fiction is by subject and is less sorted, For example, maritime is a block about cargo ships, then liners, then naval, but unsorted within those three groups.

as in actually read all the words, cover to cover, or just dip in and browse through? do they have a lot of pictures? otherwise, mannnnnn, that's some fast reading, ogg

If you're looking to buy, you have to look beyond all the gingerbread.....

Otherwise, you're being played.

yes, of course, but some people actually live that way, as that article shows... they like 'the architectural' appearance, but mainly it's about the neutral white/cream tones

 

[butters]

https://www.jasmine-roth.com/blog/h...really simple answer,in order to display them.

so the copyright's the thing but designers are embracing it as a stylistic choice, or–at the very least–saying so on screen or in print... i think we can simply go with what sean said. it covers the lot

and 'hi!', Lori

 

[oggbashan]

as in actually read all the words, cover to cover, or just dip in and browse through? do they have a lot of pictures? otherwise, mannnnnn, that's some fast reading, ogg
...

I have slowed down with age. In my forties, I used to read three or four normal length paperback novels on my train journey to work, and the same number on the way home - an hour and a half each way.

For nearly 50 years I have annoyed my wife. She takes about three days to read a book but my recall of the same book, read in half an hour or less, is better than hers...

I read a newspaper every morning over breakfast. It takes me about a quarter of an hour. My wife takes three hours for the same paper. She can't read anything over my shoulder. I have moved on to the next page before she is aqwaurter of away down.

 

[Chernosoth]

The late Duke Of Windsor, in his Paris apartment, had a wall of books with boring titles such as 'The proceedings of the accounts society for 1928/9' all arranged by size, not title or category.

Putting books of different heights together wastes some space above the short books. I make some exceptions for books by one author. I built bookshelves with various heights for efficient storage, with a slight bonus of insulation value. One shelf has a blank space for a book I have been slowly reading for weeks. I may stuff it with socks or something to insulate.

 

[butters]

I have slowed down with age. In my forties, I used to read three or four normal length paperback novels on my train journey to work, and the same number on the way home - an hour and a half each way.

For nearly 50 years I have annoyed my wife. She takes about three days to read a book but my recall of the same book, read in half an hour or less, is better than hers...

I read a newspaper every morning over breakfast. It takes me about a quarter of an hour. My wife takes three hours for the same paper. She can't read anything over my shoulder. I have moved on to the next page before she is aqwaurter of away down.

oh, those little paperbacks don't take long... i thought you were talking about nice fat books. I rarely (never, come to think of it for years) bothered with 'skinny' paperbacks... through them in no time and there's just not enough in them... or if they are good, they end too soon!

 

[oggbashan]

oh, those little paperbacks don't take long... i thought you were talking about nice fat books. I rarely (never, come to think of it for years) bothered with 'skinny' paperbacks... through them in no time and there's just not enough in them... or if they are good, they end too soon!

I didn't mean 'skinny' paperbacks. I meant ones of 3-400 pages each.

I blame my brother, who was eight years older than me. Before I started school I could read but in the early stages, I asked my brother to read to me. He was bored with my books which only used to have a few words on each page so would turn the page quickly, I thought that was the way to read a book so I scanned both open pages at once. As I read books with more words, I kept doing it, and still do.

On the day I started school my mother told the class teacher that I could read. the teacher didn't believe her, having had proud parents before. She gave me book one of the reading scheme and asked me to come back to her when I had read it. I was back in less than a minute and finished all 12 books in a quarter of an hour. By lunchtime I was given access to the school's total library. Within two weeks I had read every book in the library and was given access to the higher school's library. That took another month So I was enrolled in the town's main library - at age 5.

At age 7, we had a show and tell day about cold places. Apart from many other things I brought in the two volumes of Nansen's Farthest North. Even my teacher who was used to me by then was surprised. She asked the headteacher to come and see. the headteacher opened one volume at random and asked me to read, out loud, a page. I did, even if my classmates couldn't understand what I was reading - an account of some of the meteorological exerimenst carried out when nansen's ship was stuck in the ice.

Much later in my career, the director of the unit I was working for asked me to read Hansard (the account of the previous day's proceeding in the House of Commons) and tell his secretary by 10 am whether there was anything that might affect his department. A daily hansard for the Commons (and Lords) was about the length of the Bible (Old and New Testaments) but I could skip large chunks that were unlikely to relevant. I did that for four years. If I was onleave, and after I left it took six people to do what I had done.