On Books at your feet – an organization that sells, because the name suggests, books on foot – books could be purchased by color (options are “juicy creams”, “vintage cabernet” and “rainbow ombre”), by theme (“well read art” or “gardening “), wrapped books (covered with linen or rose gold), and more. All the volumes are “rescue books” that might otherwise be thrown away or recycled into pulp, said Charles Roberts, president of Books by the Foot, Wonder Book’s parent company.
During the lockdown pandemic in 2020, distant work created an increased demand for the corporate’s services. “People have been asking for books for Zoom meetings,” Roberts said. “They wanted classic literature, cookbooks or whatever as a backdrop, type of props, but additionally reflective of their personalities and tastes. People desired to avoid being made fun of for having an affair of their lives.”
While it mainly focuses on selling real books, the corporate has dabbled on this planet of faux books as well. The bookseller cut up the books – so only the spines remained – and glued them to the shelves on cruise ships, “where they don’t need to hold quite a lot of weight or worry concerning the books falling off the shelves if the weather gets bad,” Mr Roberts said.
There are also other, sometimes counter-intuitive, uses for fake volumes. While it may well hold greater than 1.35 million, most of the books within the 360,000-square-foot Tianjin Binhai Chinese Library they should not real. Instead, you’ll find perforated aluminum plates decorated with images of books, mainly on the upper shelves of the atrium. While the presence of artificial books within the reading area was widely criticized – “more fiction than books”, one heading ridiculed, it stays a bustling tourist attraction. After all, books haven’t got to be real in the event that they are only for a gram.
Tina Ramchandani, a New York interior designer, said her company uses fake books in each business and residential properties. For the locker room at a members-only club in New Jersey, “where nobody was really going to read the books, but where there have been bookshelves, we had all of the fake books,” Ms Ramchandani said.