To paraphrase Gibbon on the Roman Emperor Gordian’s 22 acknowledged concubines, my books are for use, not ostentation.

The books on the shelves have largely turned into wallpaper as students and faculty have become more comfortable with digital formats.

Lisa Jacobs, the founder and chief executive of Imagine It Done, a home organization service in New York City, said that out of hundreds of projects in the past few years, she can recall only three requests to organize books. In one of those examples, the arranged books were treated as a backdrop — to be admired, but not read. “The clientele that has collected books through the years are not as numerous for us,” she said.

In a postwar world in which educational self-improvement seemed within everyone’s reach, the Great Books could be presented as an item of intellectual furniture, rather like their prototype, the Encyclopedia Britannica (which also backed the project).

One online company, Books by the Foot, offers to ‘curate a library that matches both your personality and your space’, promising to provide books ‘based on colour, binding, subject, size, height, and more to create a collection that looks great’.

Unlike books, tablets do not offer a medium for demonstrating taste and refinement. That is why interior decorators use shelves of books to create an impression of elegance and refinement in the room.

If Seneca or Martial were around today, they would probably write sarcastic epigrams about the very public exhibition of reading text messages and in-your-face displays of texting. Digital reading, like the perusing of ancient scrolls, constitutes an important statement about who we are. Like the public readers of Martial’s Rome, the avid readers of text messages and other forms of social media appear to be everywhere. Though in both cases the performers of reading are tirelessly constructing their self-image, the identity they aspire to establish is very different. Young people sitting in a bar checking their phones for texts are not making a statement about their refined literary status. They are signalling that they are connected and – most importantly – that their attention is in constant demand.

The moralist critique of ostentatious book owning articulated by Seneca in the first century CE was at the core of Sebastian Brant’s complaints in his Ship of Fools (1494).19