‘Look how well-read I am!’ How ‘books by the metre’ add the final touch to your home – or your image

It’s never been easier to build an impressive-looking library, especially if you’re mostly interested in the colour and size of your books. Is this necessarily a bad thing?People have always used books to assert their sophistication and affluence. You need only visit the library of a National Trust property to see that. The novelist F Scott Fitzgerald famously critiqued the shallowness of the super-rich via his character, Jay Gatsby, who lined his shelves with books in order to project a cultured image of himself – yet they were “uncut” and had never been read.To one guest at Gatsby’s party, that doesn’t matter – he describes the shelves (that he had at first assumed to be cardboard facades of books) as “a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too – didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?” Continue reading...

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