Been laid up for a while and seeing a ton of home remodeling shows. Almost universally when there is a bookcase, all of the books are racked with the pages out instead of the bindings, as normal people do. Why?
Quite likely for the same reason logos are often blurred out - that displaying the title might be construed as advertising.
Plus, displays often use artificial books (I almost said “fake books” but those are very real, and are a type of sheet music).
Clean white lines that don’t distract from the overall look in the way that a shelf full of visible titles does. Also avoids people becoming judgey that the bookshelf contains perfectly bound runs of classics that in all likelihood have never been opened, let alone read, or metres of romance thrillers, either of which might sour your view of the mythical owners of the made-up interior.
My cynical mind leapt to the reason being that no set of books in modern America can be non-offensive to everyone. Certain subject, certain titles, certain authors would bring down a flood of internet abuse.
There’s always the perennial Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.
One of my favorite things to do when watching an interview show is to pause the show when there are books in the background. I swear that some of the people being interviewed deliberately chose books that show how knowledgeable they are on the topic. Those shows seem to be showing actual books, some that I recognize. And sometimes I’ll look up a title to see if perhaps I should read it.
Which defeats the purpose of the home remodeling shows. You’re supposed to look at the fancy decorating, not the books.
Decorators often choose books bound in certain color ways to display.
I find it disturbing. I especially hate to see fancy bound books stacked on a table with an oh so special candle or silver framed photo on top.
Why?
Because people are idiots. There’s really no other explanation.
They might think that they’re looking impressive to smart people, by showing off how many books they have, but anyone who actually cares about books is just getting the message that they have no interest in reading, and is also getting the message that they’re pretentious about it.
I’d react much more positively to someone who just didn’t have any books on display at all. They’re at least honest about not reading.
Like a lot of things in modern America books are symbolically aspirational. Class, wealth, standing have been abbreviated in marketing speech so that a passing camera move over an example pings a neuron. The viewer doesn’t need to desire it for themselves, they merely need to understand that it capsulizes a larger picture that corresponds to their aims.
We had a stager decorate our house because we wanted it completely emptied, painted, and deep-cleaned before we put it on the market. She kept a couple of large pieces of furniture we couldn’t fit into our new smaller place and added everything from fake beds to paintings of flowers. The point was not to show the house as a whole, but to give little examples that people with a variety of tastes could spot and visualize it in the home of their own making.
Must have worked. The property was open for one weekend, got 12 offers, and sold for 40% over listing.
I do this every time. I think it started during COVID when there was expert after expert jabbering on from home in front of their bookshelf.
I’ve noticed that, if there is a book on display that is turned face-on to the camera, it is invariably the speaker’s own book.
I also, while scanning the spines, count how many of the titles I have in my own colleciton. My record is four (they’re almost always presidential biographies).
mmm
We toured the model home in a new development a block from us. Their staging was interesting. They took some doors off to make the room look bigger, put in a smaller bed, ditto, and had no curtains in the bathroom window to make it look lighter. Which was fine except it looked out over a bar.
As for the OP, I bet it is from just a white strip of books looking more appealing than a clash of spine colors and designs. When I once arranged my '50s and '60s sf paperbacks by publisher and number, it looked more unified than by author and title. Though I could never find anything.
That’s always been my assumption. Partly because those shows fairly reliably blur all artwork, too—not just family photos, but anything framed. Something unblurred might inspire complaints to the network (and show-producers).
Lawsuit City, Arizona.
that’s a reference to a beloved (by me) British comedy show of the 1970s.
I was once interviewed as an “expert” in an area of law. Before the interview the TV crew got a bunch of the oldest legal books they could find from our library and set them up behind me in a dimly lit area with one of those traditional banker’s desk lamps they dug up from somewhere and I did the interview.
Then I went back to my brightly lit office with a computer monitor on my desk, same as any other modern white collar worker.
I would rather have a nice bookcase with real books, and if I was worried about viewers being judgy about my tastes, I just wouldn’t let the camera get close enough to be able to read the titles.
I can’t be the only one here who keeps their “presentable” books in the living room where people can see them, with all the SF paperbacks and detective novels hidden away in the bedroom and study.
Even then, I’ll bet you actually present your presentable books, instead of hiding them spine-in like some illiterate who doesn’t know what a “book” is for.
This is such a terrible take. Do you honestly think that home designers are looking at books like some sort of cryptic items that they have no idea what they are for? It’s for purely aesthetic reasons - they want you to see the whole space, without being distracted by any particular items.
When stagers set up homes for sale, they do the same thing. They remove all clutter, usually turn the books around, etc. They want you to see the space, not focus on minutiae.
In other words, they don’t know what books are for, and think they just exist to provide a bland backdrop.
If they want me to see the space instead of focusing on what’s on the shelves, then they need to either put the books on the shelves the right way, or put something other than books on the shelves, because books on shelves the wrong way is such a screaming signal of ignorance that I won’t be able to notice anything else about the room.
In many cases they do.
Many things can be true all at the same time. I see you’ve watched interior design shows before. You may have noticed that people have different opinions about how particular rooms/houses look. This is an example of that.
And having the spines visible is a distraction the real estate agent wants to avoid. People will end up looking at the titles instead of looking at the house.