Thinking is even harder than reading so we’re gratified to hear that Strand Bookstore in NYC has a service by which the image-conscious can purchase “Books By The Foot.”
Our personal favorite is the “Foreign Language Antique Leather” collection. It’s cheaper than the “top shelf” leather books because it’s “the same beautiful antique leather books as above with books mostly in French, Spanish, and German.”
Perfect for the stingy polyglot?
Get ready to repeat the following: “No, I don’t speak French, those were my great-great grandmothers. Or something.”
Some of the collections do seem kinda neat, however. We love books.
Books By The Foot [BuzzFeed]
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You can’t assume that someone who has old, leatherbound books just bought them to look pretentious. I have a set of antique books I inherited which I haven’t had TIME to read, but if you look in the frontispiece, you can see my great, great grandfather’s name and the date he bought it, carefully recorded.
as a small luxury i can leave it to the someone who works with books all day, they’ll know better than me what’s good. anyways as Selianth pointed out $30 a foot for contemporary fiction is a bargain.
i’d think of an assembled library as a challenge to myself to actually read them and be exposed to material i might not find on my own. not a ron burgundy device.
If you do this at the Strand you just might get some books that used to be in what is now my kid’s room. The Strand buys used books, and when cleaning out the room two years ago to get ready for the new baby I collected six boxes of books that I sold to the Strand for $400.
Just last week I was in a bar on the Upper West Side that had lots of bookshelves and I said to myself that all the books looked liked they came from the Strand’s by-the-foot service. Nobody was reading them, they were just for decoration.
Another set of buyers for these books are real estate people who are staging places for sale. They want the bookshelve to look like a library they see on TV, not like a real world bookshelf with a mix of paperbacks and magazines and ratty well-read books.
Can I just say how much I love the Strand? It’s always the first place I go when I am in NYC.
The Strand has been doing this for as long as I can remember. It is how I originally heard about the Strand over 15 years ago.
The sad thing is you can go to a yard sale or cheap books sections and buy this many books, hand selected by books you like, that costs a lot less. Unless you are picky about the titles you show…
If you think this sounds sad, my grandpa has cabinet door that looks a bookshelf, but actually only has the spines of classic books cut off and glued onto the wood. Behind it is a TV and sound system. They don’t even look that good; it’s obvious they aren’t real books.
My bookcases are filled with ancient volumes picked up from the Goodwill for 50 cents. Brattle Bookstore in Boston would sometimes ship useless books over there before people caught on. When times are tight I sometimes pull out a volume or set and sell them on Ebay.
I always buy leather bound books of classics but am too afraid to damage them so i buy a cheap second hand paper back to actually read and land to my friends. Plus the musty smell of old paperbacks is kinda nice.
So…whos buying a tote bag!? I know I am.
I have a matched set of beat up clive cussler novels- does that make me pretentious or stupid (or both?)
@Rajio: Are you kidding? If they sold them by the meter, they’d cost like 3.28 times more!
You can dress up a monkey and give him the presidential seal, but he’ll still be an idiot that flings poop.
These books are aesthetically pleasing, but from what little I know “smartness” does not hop down from a bookshelf to greet you just because you bought a pretty book.
@Meg Marco: Well, how else are we supposed to verify that the latest update of PDR is accurate? Trust the man?!
@john OB1: damnit… i even looked up the exact quote before I saw you posted it!
Just because someone buys a book because it’s pretty I don’t think that’s so wrong.
Reading books is great, but there are a lot of things that get used for their aesthetics. I really doubt all those people who wear sports jerseys play baseball or football or basketball, etc. Some of them do, I’m sure.
Not everybody who wears tennis shoes plays tennis, either.
Do the commentors who dislike people buying books for their appearance feel the same way about people who buy pianos or other musical instruments but don’t play them? Collectors who display comic books, action figures, coins, etc. but never use them?
@Rectilinear Propagation: I think it would be a big waste of money to buy that sort of stuff and never use them. I mean, who buys a piano that doesn’t know how to play it and never plays it? I’m sure there are people, but that seems really ridiculous. Pianos cost a lot of money.
Collectors do usually read the comic books they collect, they just do it with care.
I don’t care if someone buys decorative books, but I think your examples (other than the coins) are not well thought out.
And, people who buy books by the yard are trying to adopt pretensions for which they’re ill-suited. Being literate, quasi-intellectuals in this case.
Jay Gatsbys, in other words. Without the charm or mystery.
Just… Sad.
You’re a horrible, horrible person.
Oh, I do miss Strand…I’m in TX now & there’s a used bookstore chain called “1/2Price Books” and they sell BBY (‘books by the yard’).
They’re sold mostly for decoration: architects, photographers, corporate housing, hotels – that kinda thing. Lotsa old encyclopedia sets (or ‘encyclopaedia’ for you Britannica folks.)
BTW if you’re ever down in TX, I can highly recommend 1/2Price Books. The selection is large, eclectic, changes constantly and the staff is always great.