It’s a storm in a teacup as Twitter users like it: at the end of March, an account sat ironically an excerpt from a video in which American actress Ashley Tisdale showed a team from the magazine her house Architectural Digest.
Reviewing her decor in the purest Californian style, the star of the Disney franchise High School Musical made this very spontaneous confidence about his library:
“To be honest, these shelves were empty two days ago. I asked my husband to go to the bookstore and said, ‘I need 400 books’.”
Well-researched Zoom wallpapers
Faced with sarcasm, the actress defended herself: “A clarification: there are books that I have accumulated over the years, but, you see, not enough to fill 36 shelves that can each hold 22 books. I did what any interior designer would do. They do it all the time, I just had the candor to say it.”
The Guardian confirms it: “Buying books in whole bundles has become commonplace among celebrities, especially since they became scholarly decor [pour les visioconférences] on Zoom.”
The generalization of telework with the pandemic has given “even more visibility to this phenomenon”, notes the British daily, which cites as an example a dedicated Twitter account to the examination of the books seen in the background of the people on video.
Covers associated with the color of the walls
Sniffing out the windfall, some very early on developed a real business around the book as a decorative object. So of Thatcher Wine. This bibliophile and interior decorator presents himself as a “book curator”, the equivalent for books of what a curator is for the arts (art curator, in English). A few years ago, he was approached by star Gwyneth Paltrow, who asked him to “find him 600 pounds for his newly renovated house”.
In the early 2000s, Wine founded Juniper Books, which has now become a site that offers bespoke decorating solutions. As the newspaper explains, its founder “sells collections of literary classics with personalized dust jacket”. The ideal way, underlines the interested party, “to allow someone to own the complete works of Jane Austen, but in a carefully chosen color from the Pantone color chart to match the rest of the room”.
Kate Middleton and her books
Filling your library with beautiful books, however, has a cost, warns the Guardianwhich cites decorator services in the United Kingdom up to 5,000 pounds (nearly 6,000 euros).
More affordable, the Clothbound Classics collection, developed by publisher Penguin, offers novels embellished with graphic covers – covers that their followers could see on the Instagram account of Kate Middleton and her husband in 2020.
Bea Carvalho, head of fiction for the Waterstones bookstore chain, assures us: the design of books is an aspect to which publishers are paying more and more attention, as it is likely to increase their visibility on social networks. “It’s important to have beautiful images to show… The colored slices, for example, look very good on BookTok and Instagram.”
As for the background of the books, decoration experts advise giving preference to non-fiction works, on subjects that really interest their owners (if they do not read them…). “It’s with novels that we get screwed”, relief The Guardianwho quotes a London interior designer:
“[Quelqu’un vous lance] ‘Have you read the last of so and so?’ And it doesn’t miss, you haven’t read it.”