Wall of Books

Definition

The wall of books is the decorative convention Braham's essay takes as its test case: the display of book-filled shelves in modern interiors, an "objet-type" — "a decorative convention that can be deployed even in the homes of nonreaders" — whose analysis opens "a partial history of the architectural palette that arises from the privileging of natural over applied finishes." The convention appears identically in Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson's The International Style (1932) and Emily Post's The Personality of a House (1930), which is exactly its theoretical interest: it crosses the high-style/advice-literature divide that the natural/applied opposition was supposed to police.

The convention's genealogy: "The closed bookcase has its own history, traceable to the time when books were rare and required protection. As Edith Wharton described it in The Decoration of Houses, the 'natural bookcase was a chest with a strong lock.' The open and decorative display of books only became common with their increased production and availability in the eighteenth and, especially, the nineteenth centuries," derived initially "from private libraries where different forms of storage and their decoration had been explored by those privileged enough to own substantial collections. Books still suggest something of that aristocratic provenance, and their public display in the homes of the middle class – designed or not – owes much to that formation." As with other collection displays (ceramics, stuffed animals, musical recordings), objects are deployed "to represent the character of the occupants, but books exceed the personal statement and have attained the status of an objet-type."

The convention's gender work is double. Books are subversive decoration: they let colour re-enter the natural/neutral palette "under the guise of craftsmanship and scholarship, apparently slipping a feminine note of decoration into obviously masculine interiors" (de Wolfe: "think of thousands of books with brilliant bindings… this cypress room is simply glowing with color"). Post's "Room for a Man" codifies the masculine pole: "the most furnishing decorations are well-filled book-shelves, not too closely matched" — odd lots and reference books being "far more suggestive of the man who reads than are even rows of splendidly-tooled bindings – unless bindings are his hobby." And the convention operates by identity negotiation rather than formal principle: as the Max Ernst bookcase collage shows, it "involves both the inspecting gaze of the occupant and the return look of the interior. A wall of books not only appears masculine, but reassures its occupant that he or she is conforming to the complex image of rationality, literacy, and authenticity that books convey." Post even documented the artificial version — "Faked Bindings for Decoration" — producing "the look of masculine amenity." The convention's resistance to displacement into interior design ("plainly decorative elements can remain architectural") preserves books' affiliation with utility through reading — but the deployed "red ones!" book shows the objet-type works even without it.

Key Thinkers

• William W. Braham — the convention's analyst: books as objet-type, subversive decoration, and identity-negotiating wall; the essay's method ("narrative forms for their exploration").
• Emily Post — the convention's codifier of the domestic register: The Personality of a House (1930), "A Room for a Man," the red-books anecdote, and "Faked Bindings for Decoration."
• Elsie de Wolfe — the decorator's version: the library as "simply glowing with color" — brilliant bindings under the guise of scholarship.
• Edith Wharton — the genealogist of the closed bookcase: the "natural bookcase was a chest with a strong lock" (The Decoration of Houses, 1897).
• Max Ernst — the collage of the bookcase as the return look: the interior inspecting its occupant back.
• Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the editors who frame the excerpt around "books as displayed collections and their reading as decorative wall elements."

Related Concepts

• The Decorative — books as decorative convention that resists the decorative's displacement into interior design.
• Domestic Interior — the convention's site: the middle-class home, the library, the "Room for a Man."
• Taste — what the wall of books discriminates: "made colorful by many books (red ones!)" as taste's decorative variety within the natural palette.
• Gender and the Interior — the convention's gender economy: masculine amenity produced by authentic-looking books; the feminine note slipped in through colour.
• Interiority — the return look: the interior that reassures its occupant of his conformity to "rationality, literacy, and authenticity."
• Natural Finishes — the palette the wall of books decorates: colourful variety inside the natural/neutral convention.
• Narrative Space — the method the convention demands: identity negotiation "requires narrative forms for their exploration."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• A Wall of Books (Braham 1999/2006) — the primary and founding source: the convention's presence in both The International Style and The Personality of a House (p. 56); Wharton's chest with a strong lock and the aristocratic provenance (p. 57); the objet-type thesis (p. 57); Post's "Room for a Man" and the red-books anecdote (p. 60); de Wolfe's glowing cypress room and subversive decoration (p. 60); faked bindings and the Max Ernst return look (p. 61).
• Toward the immaterial interior (Jacobus 2018) — the convention scaled to a building: Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève as the book wall monumentalized into a civic register — "In addition to the building's exterior acting as a virtual card catalog, the entire interior space tells a story that unfolds page by page, as if the visitor is perusing a book." Where Braham's wall of books reassures a domestic occupant's identity ("rationality, literacy, and authenticity"), Labrouste's building is the book wall promoted to a civic register: the whole interior a book, the visitor a reader completing "the dialogue with humanity's great thinkers." The pairing gives the convention its media-history frame: books in interiors were the second register's furniture; Labrouste's building is the interior built to serve it (see cultural-registers, narrative-space).

Open Questions

• Does the wall of books survive in contemporary interiors (the styled bookshelf, the Instagram library wall) — and is the Instagram book wall the objet-type's purest form yet, reading optional, colour mandatory?
• Is the "subversive decoration" thesis reversible — does the feminine note slip in through the books, or does the masculine coding of the library actually domesticate the decoration (craftsmanship and scholarship as alibi)?
• What is the relation between the objet-type and identity negotiation — can a convention be pure sign (faked bindings) and still do the reassurance work, and does that collapse the real/faked distinction the convention polices?
• Braham's method claim — that color conventions "require narrative forms for their exploration" — what would a narrative history of other decorative conventions (the white wall, the exposed beam) look like, and can it be generalized?