Daily Archives: December 4, 2016

Books As a Fashion Statement?

I love books with well-designed covers. I wrote about them in my April 27, 2013 Blog, The Great Cover-Up. But what’s most important about a book is what’s written on the pages. Once again, I was aghast to come upon a home design article that suggested a cozy look could be easily achieved by purchasing books en masse at garage and estate sales, or other places where “old hard-cover books can be snatched up in dollar bins” in order to “lend your space the collected feel of a library.”

No mention of creating your fashionable home with books carefully chosen and joyfully read. Making your home feel like a library by stacking any old books you have no interest in reading is akin to inviting a group of strangers to live in your home based solely on what they’re wearing, then having no communication with them: a fast track to disappointment.

If your “space” lacks enough handsome hardcover books to feel like a cozy library, here are three suggestions to bring books into your home that will feed your imagination as well as your fashion sense:

1. Put books you’d like to read on your holiday wish list for people to give you.
2. Visit your local independent book store and let them help you select books that fit your interests (these stores are great for that friendly service).
3. If you’re on a tight budget, see if your library sells used books. The selections are usually plentiful and varied, the prices are bargains and the money helps support the library.


With winter starting to settle in and more time being spent indoors, books are just waiting to transport us to other places.

Quotable

We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif-books in piles and on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are books waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books…They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables…I can’t imagine a home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you’d longed to fall asleep reading the Aspern Papers, and there it is. – Louise Erdrich

My books hold between their covers every story I’ve ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices. — Alberto Manguel