Dear Reader

I don’t read anywhere near as many books as I used to. Too much time entirely now being spent on the news, grazing Twitter throughout the day and clicking through on any interesting article that appears as a tweet link. Up until a few years ago, I was probably reading 2+ books a week. Now it’s more like 2- books a month.

My backlog includes Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, Adrian McKinty’s The Chain, a bunch of other books piled underneath these two on the armchair next to my bed, and three manuscripts of books written by friends. On my Kindle, I haven’t quite finished with the Mueller Report.

I am way and guiltily behind on my reading.

Yet I continue to buy books, and I am resolved to get better at reading them.

I don’t hang on to most of the books I buy. My sisters, brother and I trade off, and books that everyone’s read end up at Kath’s Cape house so that guests always have something to read if they finish the books they brought with them. (One of the best things about hanging out at Kath’s is that there’s a lot of downtime for reading, which has always been how our family rolls.)

I do hang on to some books – books I really love, short story collections, some poetry, some biographies, some histories. I used to have a reasonably good fiction-nonfiction Holocaust collection, but I gave it away. I have a modest collection of Irish-related books. Some of my mother’s books. I have a full set of the Betsy-Tacy-Tib books by Maud Hart Lovelace, my favorite girlhood reads. I have a whole bunch of books I’m going to get to some day.

But considering how many books I’ve read in my life, I don’t have a ton of books. Still, I have plenty. If I’m ever blizzarded in, and can’t download anything to my Kindle, I’ll still be alright.

Here’s what one of my bookcases looks like:

This one is books that I’ve read, plus family pictures, and other stuff. (I have a fondness for both books and stuff.)

I’m guessing that this is what the bookcases of most readers look like: full of well-read and often well-loved books, plus or minus the tchotchkes.

And this is what the bookcase of someone who could give a rat’s arse about reading books, but rather regards books as décor looks like. Maybe even as tchotchkes. In this case, I give you one of the curated bookcases of Gwyneth Paltrow.

The books in this bookcase were shelved by one Thatcher Wine (nom de plume, my sister Trish asks…), bibliophile and collector, who somewhere along the way became a designer and stocker of:

…libraries based on interest, author, and even color for his clients. (Source: Town and Country)

One of Wine’s specialties is the creation of custom book jackets.

My invention for the book jacket means that someone can have the complete works of Jane Austen, but in a certain Pantone chip color that matches the rest of the room or with a custom image.

Thus, that lovely color coordinated rainbow library depicted above. What was I thinking when I grouped my books by some combination of topic, genre, and author that makes sense only to me. I could have been picking Pantone colors to blend in with my Benjamin Moore wall paint choices.

If you go the Pantone route, I have to wonder whether what’s in the book matters. Why not just put your tasteful and matchy-tatchy covers on whatever you can get in the remainder bin somewhere? So what if you end up with a bunch of Tom Clancys. Or Mueller reports.

But there’s always the possibility that an inquiring mind might actually pick one of the books off the shelf. So to spare yourself the embarrassment of having someone think that you read Harlequin romances, you need to carefully curate what’s under the Pantone covers.

According to Thatcher Wine:

The Stoic philosophers are having a moment now. And classic bestsellers like Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen always do well.

The Stoics, eh? I can see why Cato the Younger and Marcus Aurelius are having a moment. Maybe even Dionysius the Renegade. But, seriously folks, is there anyone out there who believes that Zeno of Citium and Publius Rutilius Rufus are having mos? Come on. Colson Whitehead and Aidan McKinty are having moments, not Zeno of Citium.

No word on whether the Stoics are having a moment on Gwyneth’s bookshelves. Wine based his choices for her on books she owned and her kids liked. And rewrapped them. Colors galore for the family room. And:

In the dining room, we stuck to a more rigid color palette of black, white, and gray since it was less of a space where one might hang out and read.

Dear Lord. The purpose of a book is to be read. Or to be planned to be read. At some point. (Come full retirement, come blizzard.) Not to be color-coded.

Dear reader, can you for a New York - or even a Goop - minute imagine re-covering your books in bespoke Pantone color covers? 

I’ve heard it said that “art shouldn’t match the couch.” Your books don’t need to match your walls, either

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A tip of the Pink Slip chapeau – Pantone number d74894 – to author, editor and Dorothy Day expert Robert Ellsberg, who tweeted about this Town and Country article. Robert is one of the wonderful Tweeters I follow, one of many who I read each day when I should probably be picking up a good book…