It’s time to get your bookshelves in order
The ubiquitous furniture item should reflect your personality — whether displaying books, art or accessories
“Squawk Box” co-host Becky Quick usually works from the CNBC business show’s slick set in the NASDAQ MarketSite studio in Times Square. But since March 10, she has handled her part of the popular early morning business show from a spare bedroom of her New Jersey home, a response to the coronavirus pandemic.
CNBC colleagues delivered camera equipment to her front porch, then she and her husband promptly disinfected it and brought it inside. She pulled in a bookshelf with some favorite book titles and the occasional finished Lego project by her 8-year-old son, Kyle Quayle.
“Squawk Box” handles serious business topics, but that doesn’t stop Quick or her co-hosts — Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin — from showing a sense of humor.
Kernan is back in the NASDAQ studio, but Quick is still home for social distancing, now sitting in front of a green screen that looks more ubiquitous and less like a slice of her home.
Bookshelves may seem like an afterthought to anyone shopping for or building a new home — a decorative element to break up wall space in a family room or a functional place to put things in an office or study. Interior designers, though, will tell you that when bookshelves are done well, they’re a major statement about a homeowner’s life: what they read, the style of art they prefer, the moments they chose to capture in photos they display.
They’ll show off your children or grandchildren, document your travels and show glimmers of your hobbies through photos, books and other accessories, from shells gathered on a tropical beach to duck decoys found at antiques stores or leather-bound books with well-worn pages.
Quick and her family are avid readers, so there are plenty of books for her to choose from and she liked being able to rotate in new book titles. Some were simply good reads, others made people hit the “stop” button on their remote control, then rewind to get a second look.
“The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck,” was one
such title on Quick’s shelf not long ago. A handful of viewers commented on the stop-you-inyour-tracks title, but her CNBC bosses didn’t say a word.
Still, the book was quickly removed, replaced by another: something readers would think was funny, or maybe a memoir written by someone Quick has interviewed — such as Nike cofounder Phil Knight, the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham or former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
“My son is dying to get his Legos back on the air,” Quick said, noting that when she started showing them off she heard from the Lego company as well as someone who wrote a book about Lego bricks. “They have been something that brings us closer to the viewers.”
Never before have bookshelves been on bigger display, in our homes, in the media and in social media during the pandemic. TV anchors and personalities working from home for social distancing and regular folks have set up home offices and communicate with clients, co-workers and friends through Zoom meetings and other video calls.
That has made staging shelves in a home or an office an art, and interior designers such as Cheryl Baker of CDB Interiors or Kiley Jackson and Aileen Warren of Jackson Warren Interiors do that for clients regularly.
“You want to look (at shelves) and see the things you love. I say to people, ‘Tell me what you love about your house … what are the things you love?’ ” Baker said. “Bookshelves are such a part of that. It’s the mix of things, and you’re showing off who you are.”
“We believe in asymmetry,” Warren said. “You don’t want any two shelves to be styled the same way. We want them to look balanced with what’s next to it and in the overall composition (of a room).”
Though it may sound obvious, books are crucial to bookshelves looking good. .
Jackson mentioned one client who inherited books from a grandmother. The book titles themselves weren’t important to the client, but the books were. To create a monochromatic look, they turned the books around so the end with the paper pages — not the books’ spines —faced out. They added the client’s wooden duck decoys, scattered in singles and in pairs, along with a silver bowl, wooden boxes and a bowl of antique croquet balls. A simple piece of framed art hung on the outside of the frame of the shelves.
In a man’s study, with built-in lower cabinets and shelving made of a steel frame and stained wooden shelves, books were included but were not the most important element. Jackson and Warren hung guitars on a wall nearby, framed art on the shelves and on wall space, and included pottery, a shadow box with fishing lures, a football, wooden box, a smattering of fiction and nonfiction books and even a pair of children’s saddle shoes.
When books are used as an important part of the décor, they can be arranged by color — a popular trend in interior design now. You’ll find images all over Pinterest of shelves arranged like a rainbow: rows of books with red, blue, yellow, orange or green spines.
A few years ago the organizeby-color topic was a design hot button that could draw praise or criticism — let’s just assume that in your own home you can do what you want, no judging here.
If you don’t have enough of any one color and you don’t care what the books are, you can purchase them in quantity at booksbythefoot.com, where they’re listed by color and size and you buy a minimum of 2 feet — and titles don’t matter. They even have categories of vintage colors if you like your books to look really old and used.
There are times when a client has too many books — with shelves so stuffed with them that it’s visually overwhelming. That’s when you edit them down to a manageable number, moving the overflow to other rooms or maybe packing them up to give away.
For one client with an abundance of books, they whittled them down to a manageable number and added things from elsewhere in the home: a potted plant, blue and white porcelain for upper shelves, wooden boxes and some pieces from a collection of antique liquor bottles.
“Paying attention to scale and proportion is important,” Jackson said. “You build interest with different objects — each client is different and each client’s collection is different. We love to celebrate what’s important to the client, no matter what it is, from a collection of bells to a collection of porcelain or duck decoys. Those all might seem like odd things to put on a shelf … but you can really display anything.”
Though most will say there’s no right or wrong way to approach bookshelf staging, most would agree to not overdo it.
“Everyone struggles with it. I don’t have one client who doesn’t wants me to help them with staging a bookcase for their house,” Baker said. “One of the best things I can share is to be sure that what you’re putting on your shelves means something to you and is unique to you or your family, whether it’s art, a collection, pictures of your family or greenery.”