When you walk into a person’s house for the first
time and see a plasma TV, you know what the conversation is not
going to be about: Milan Kundera’s latest book of essays. When you
see a bookshelf in a corner or a stack of books under the glass of
the coffee table, you would sneak a peek at the spines before picking a
topic, or not. A room full of books, a proper library would
establish the class by itself.But in the age of e-books, you could be in a pickle. A new Harris Interactive survey finds, first, 15% of Americans now use an e-reading device, up from 8% one year ago, and one in six other Americans plan to buy one in the next six months. Second, those with e-readers read more books. Third, those with e-readers buy more books.
All this is bad news for the furnishing industry -- Ikea’s entire range of bookshelves will become redundant -- and we will all need to learn new social skills – when you have a full library all you need to do is to keep the door slightly ajar so your guest can peek into it on the way to the kitchen, or bathroom, or wherever, to take up class positions. “Most of them are my husband’s – he’s such a reader, you know – but many of them, I confess, are mine. I tell him they’re his; he’s got so many he wouldn’t know. Ha ha. But I do love the classics.”
What, if anything, can you do with a Kindle? How does one brag?
“Denuded of books, all that wall space presents a fresh canvas on which to express yourself,” says Harry de Quetteville in The Telegraph. Wallpapers are making a return. What would one put in the toilet for guests to read? What would one do with the room one uses as a study, the library? Put in a pool table perhaps. If you have the money, why not make it an art gallery? But the most difficult part, I think, will be giving the home the lived-in look. Books can be strewn about on any horizontal surface, even the stairs. What can we toss around to give our home that classy-cluttered look?
The Telegraph
