14 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2023
  2. Jun 2023
  3. Mar 2023
    1. 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.

      Any book collector worth their salt will already have in mind the way they want their collection arranged. Only someone who wants to use it as wallpaper would have a service arrange it.

      I wonder what the other two cases were?

    1. 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).

      the phrase "intellectual furniture" is sort of painful here...

  4. Feb 2023
    1. 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’.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
  5. Aug 2022
    1. David Quammen on Books

      Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.<br /> —David Quammen (1948 ― ), science, nature, and travel writer in The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder

      Syndication link: - https://boffosocko.com/2016/08/03/intellectual-wallpaper/

  6. Apr 2022
    1. I put some visual noise on the big screen if I’m not using it for work, usually an art film or a landscape documentary, muted.

      Perhaps I should be creating some beautiful visual noise myself?

    1. 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

      Compare this idea to the recent descriptions of modern homes using books solely for decoration or simply as "wallpaper".

  7. May 2019