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Photo:
Natasha Meininger
Interior designer
Natasha Meininger
shared what she thought was an innocuous Instagram picture of her bookshelf. How little did she know.
“Man, do people hate it,” she says, talking about the way she stacked her books. “It’s silly that I have to say this, but I do read and I like books, too.”
Why might anyone wonder? Maybe because Ms. Meininger, 33, who lives in Hannibal, Mo., had arranged her books backward, with the spines facing the wall.
The minimalist look has caught on in certain design circles. By turning books around, the taupe and white page edges are shown on a shelf instead of book spines that often don’t match the rest of the décor.
“It can give a really sculptural effect,” says Ms. Meininger, who arranged some books horizontally and others vertically. There are other advantages, too. “You can get a little crazier with other things in the home if you have a neutral palette.”
There’s just one catch. Hiding a book’s spine also obscures useful information, like the title of the book or its author—and that has some people feeling snubbed.
“The spine of a book is like a hand reaching out,” says
Peter Pearson,
an author of children’s books such as “How to Eat an Airplane.” “You are trading the generosity of a book for eggshell white.”
Mr. Pearson, 37, who lives in Minneapolis, says he often finds reading material by perusing shelves at other people’s homes and wouldn’t want to go to a home where book spines face the wall.
“It’s like pulling out the welcome mat,” he says. “Seeing books with the pages facing outward is like walking into an art gallery with all the paintings turned backward.”
Hundreds of years after the first printed works were published, people are caught in an emotional debate about the correct way to store a book on a shelf. At the heart of the controversy is the question of whether design considerations should transcend practical necessities, such as locating any one particular book, or respect for the object itself.
“Why do you even have books if you’re not interested in finding them?” says
Lauryn Soorani,
a graphic designer specializing in book design who goes by the name Lauryn Ipsum. “Donate them!”
Ms. Soorani, a 27-year-old who lives in Los Angeles, says it’s hard not to be offended. “We spent all this time making a nice spine just so you can find your book on your shelf, and now you are looking at blank pages.”
Claire Birnie,
a professional organizer in Edinburgh, Scotland, chalks up this kind of criticism to “intellectual snobbery.”
Ms. Birnie, 26, says she changes the arrangement of her books frequently. Last summer, she implemented the spine-in method for a few weeks, and now plans to reconfigure her books that way again, in protest of those who disapprove.
“It’s really elitist to say there’s a right way to enjoy books,” she says. “They are my books. I paid for them.”
Despite today’s custom of shelving books with the spine out, there’s no correct way to store a book, says
Henry Petroski,
a professor at Duke University who wrote a book on the subject. “There are always many ways to do just about everything.”
For centuries, books were stored every which way, except the way they are now, according to Mr. Petroski’s “The Book on the Bookshelf.” Before the 16th century, spines had no printed titles and were considered the least presentable part of a book.
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Getty Images/SuperStock RM
Early librarians often knew the location of books without relying on titles (or modern aids like computers). Sometimes the exposed pages, known as the fore edge, had text or embellishments, including extravagantly painted scenes from the book.
Proof of this can be found in early Renaissance depictions of scholars such as St. Jerome, who arranged his books haphazardly or with the pages facing out. It was also true in some medieval libraries, such as the Chained Library at the Hereford Cathedral in England.
The books at Hereford are shelved with the fore edges out to avoid tangling chains attached to the book—an effective, if ancient, security system. The TV series “Game of Thrones” mimics the custom at the library at the Citadel.
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RDImages/Epics/Getty Images
Hannah Briggs,
a spine-in proponent in Muscle Shoals, Ala., says she, too, usually knows where her 500-plus books are, even when the spines are hidden. “Books are really special to me, but I’m just not a color person,” says the 34-year-old lifestyle blogger. “I read 55 books last year—a little over a book a week.”
Photo:
Hannah Briggs
Ms. Briggs sometimes turns out the spines of some books to draw attention to them, she says. “It’s a great conversation starter.”
In recent years, designers and decorators have been buying books by color. At BooksbytheFoot.com, a designer can order 50 feet of “luscious creams” or opt for vintage hardbacks that have had their covers removed “to create a shabby chic look,” according to the website.
“Some people don’t want to have the literature as a distraction, but they want books as objects on a shelf,” says
Chuck Roberts,
president of Wonder Book, which operates the site and three bookstores in Maryland.
Mr. Roberts says he started the Books by the Foot service to rescue books that would otherwise get pulped. “Books bring a sense of warmth that other knickknacks won’t.”
The Center for Book Arts, a nonprofit in New York City, has featured exhibitions of sculptures made out of books. “A book collection has both aesthetic meaning and intellectual meaning,” says
Alexander Campos,
executive director of the group, whose mission is to promote the book as an art object.
“Buying a book solely for aesthetic reasons is a very strange thing,” says
Penny Reeve,
33, a publicity manager for Angry Robot, a British-based publishing house of sci-fi and fantasy titles. “Hopefully one day when they are sitting there drinking coffee, they pick one up and actually read it.”
Write to Khadeeja Safdar at khadeeja.safdar@wsj.com
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