Design Notebook: Selling a Book by Its Cover
January 10, 2011
“German is easy — it’s easy to find a complete set of vellum Goethe in the original German,” he said. But Mr. Wine had to search long and hard to find clean copies of authors like Thackeray, Galsworthy and Conrad. For this client was after more than pretty bindings: he wanted the option of being able to read his books.
The young Upper East Side client of Jenny Fischbach, a design partner at Cullman Kravis Inc., the tony Manhattan decorating firm, was similarly inclined. She wanted literary classics mixed with art books for a silver-inflected art library. So Mr. Wine chose works by Kate Chopin, Jane Austen and Robert Browning and wrapped them in matte silver paper, to match the silver hardware in the room.
Not all of Mr. Wine’s clients, who include hotel designers and high-end builders, are so fastidious about content. For the spa in Philippe Starck’s Icon Brickell, the icy glass condo tower in Miami, he was asked to wrap 1,500 books in blank white paper, without titles, to provide a “textural accent” to the space. He chose mass-market hardcovers that flood the used book outlets — titles by John Grisham and Danielle Steel, or biographies of Michael Jackson, he said — because they are cheap, clean and a nice, generous size.
For another Starck project, in Dallas, Mr. Wine used black paper to wrap the 2,000 vintage books he picked for their “distressed edges,” so they could be displayed backward.
Book lovers, you can exhale. The printed, bound book has been given a stay of execution by an unlikely source: the design community. In this Kindle-and-iPad age, architects, builders and designers are still making spaces with shelves — lots and lots of shelves — and turning to companies like Mr. Wines’s Juniper Books for help filling them.
Jeffrey Collé, a builder of vast Hamptons estates that mimic turn-of-the-century designs, wouldn’t think of omitting a library from one of his creations. A 16,800-square-foot Shingle-style house on 42 acres in Water Mill, N.Y., comes with a $29.995-million price tag and a library Mr. Collé had built from French chalked quarter-sawn oak; with about 150 feet of shelf space, there is room for more than 1,000 books.
It’s up to the buyers or their decorator to fill that space, said Mr. Collé, who has collaborated with Bennett Weinstock, a Philadelphia decorator known for his English interiors, on some of his libraries. Mr. Weinstock still shops in London to find just the right leatherbound look, he said. “Some people will insist that they be in English, because they want them to look as if they could read the books,” Mr. Weinstock said. “Others don’t care what language the books are in as long as the bindings are beautiful.”
Even a modernist builder like Steve Hermann in Los Angeles, who makes sleek multimillion-dollar houses for buyers like Christina Aguilera, includes acres of shelves in his high-end spec houses. Mr. Hermann designed a glassy Neutra-like house with a 60-by-14-foot shelving system, which has room for 4,000 books, he said.
“But who has 4,000 books?” he said. “I always stage my houses, so it was up to me to fill the shelves.” He ordered 2,000 white-wrapped books from Mr. Wine and deployed them in tidy, horizontal stacks (watch for the white-wrapped book to become this year’s version of the deer head).
Why build such huge shelves?
“I could have hung art,” Mr. Hermann said. “But I like the textural feeling of shelves, and of books on display.”
So did the buyer: the place, books included, sold for $6.4 million to a British man in the fashion business.
The old practice of buying yards of leatherbound law journals or Swedish medical texts for an instant library is out of favor. “I don’t think you should have law journals unless one of you is actually a lawyer,” Mr. Weinstock said.
Instead, some designers are finding ever more elaborate ways to tweak books their clients already own. Peter Pennoyer, a New York architect, is designing wooden boxes that look like perfectly bound books (“in sort of a tomato-soup-with-cream color,” he said) to contain an unruly looking collection of literary classics owned by a client.
“A book is a meaningful, sensory experience,” he pointed out. “If we buy her all new Trollope, then she’s suddenly looking at a volume that’s foreign, that doesn’t smell right or have the typeface that’s familiar. If she doesn’t have the memory of having read the book, it’s not going to mean the same thing. My thought is to elevate all these mismatched bindings and put them in these containers, so it all looks uniform and pretty, but the client can keep the books she’s loved for decades.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 7, 2011
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of books Mr. Wine wrapped for the spa in the condo tower Icon Brickell in Miami.
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