I would assume the ‘fancy’ books are all handmade, high-quality, and crazy expensive, but why would you assume there would be that much uniformity among different presses, limited editions, different sizes, etc?
I suppose if you ordered a bunch of books in leather that would look more uniform on a shelf than a paperback here, buckram there, colourful dust jacket yonder, but I do not see why paying $$$ ipso facto makes your books look all the same.
All that said, if your goal is to read books, rather than have them look pretty on a shelf, you probably end up just buying whatever catches your eye at the bookstore, without an eye to uniformity. I know I never tried to match books up by the way they looked.
Hey I take issue with that! Those Time-Life series had a lot of interesting content for broadly self-educated readers who hadn’t the time or interest to explore at the expert level. “John Wesley Hardin: so mean he once shot a man just fer snorin’.”
Readers Digest Condensed books were perfect for the 1950’s “Keeping Up with the Jones” culture. Pop-Lit that everyone else at the suburban cocktail party might be discussing, re-written for extreme brevity and with any risqué bits excised, all bound handsomely on the shelf next to the classy framed art.
I don’t buy novels, I buy non-fiction of a dozen different fields, and I use my library daily. Having books that are wildly different looking, basically made to stand out in a bookstore, I can zoom in on the right book from a distance. Much more effective than the semi-secretive ‘fancy’ books.
Even though ‘fancy’ books are not all the same, they are MUCH more alike than ordinary books.
Books are mostly (but not only) tools to me. It would be silly to me to spend money on having them ‘fancy’. I’d much rather buy three different low-cost paperbacks with killer content than buy one ‘fancy’ book for the same money.
Books in my bookshelf represent unread worlds to me. A varied-book shelf represents variety and richness, like looking at a rainforest. The ‘fancy’ book shelf equals a monoculture tree plantation, even if there is slight variation in size, color, texture etc.
It would be silly to have volumes such as How to Shit in the Woods, or Kerrang! Direktory of Heavy Metal clad in dainty leather.
I grew up in a house with rows of Reader’s Digest Condensed, which I knew were shite, even as a 10-year old. I read my Steinbecks and Hemingways as they were meant to. Leather and gold letters don’t convey quality content to me.
A few years ago, CBS Sunday Morning ran a story about “bespoke libraries”, in which the books in a bookcase are given custom covers so that together they make a mosaic picture. Seems kind of silly to me.
There’s a Flann O’Brien piece about a service that “handles” such “decorative” books to make them look like they were actually read(dog eared pages, random bookmarks, margin notes. etc.)
There’s a broad grey line between ‘antiques’ and ‘second hand furniture’: a similar grey line exists between ‘collectors items’ and ‘second hand books’.
Within my lifetime, second-hand books were more valuable if they were unmarked and still had their dust covers. Now that market has collapsed, but there remains a market that values books more if they show signs of their provenance.
This thread is reminding me of an installment in the classic early 20th century comic strip “Abie the Agent,” about an inveterate social climber.
Abe is impressed by a friend’s extensive library and thinks to himself “If Rosenbaum can have fency books, so can I!” The book dealer counsels “If you have mismatched books, it looks like you borrowed and didn’t return them. Buy sets!”
Soon Abe is ensconced in his new home library, and wife Reba complains to a visitor that he never goes out anymore, just stays home reading. The friend asks him what he’s reading at the moment.
“Scott’s IVANHOE.”
“But, Abe, you have the same volume here on the shelf!”
“This is from the library! Why should I spoil my fine editions?”
