Cover story: Designer libraries a fad
It took Thatcher Wine a year to amass 2,000 well-preserved white vellum and cream-colored leatherbound books for a "gentleman's library" in the estate of a private equity manager. Perfectly matched sets of books bound in antique vellum, a pale leather made from goat or sheep skin, are an elusive quarry, especially if they all have to be in English, said Wine, a former internet entrepreneur who now creates custom book collections and decorative "book solutions," as he puts it, in his Boulder, Colorado, warehouse.
"German is easy - it's easy to find a complete set of vellum Goethe in the original German," he said. But Wine had to search long and hard to find clean copies of authors like Thackeray, Galsworthy and Conrad. For this client was after more than pretty bindings: he wanted the option of being able to read his books.
The young Upper East Side client of Jenny Fischbach, a design partner at Cullman & Kravis Inc, the tony Manhattan decorating firm, was similarly inclined. She wanted literary classics mixed with art books for a silver-inflected art library. So Wine chose works by Kate Chopin, Jane Austen and Robert Browning and wrapped them in matte silver paper, to match the silver hardware in the room.
Not all of Wine's clients, who include hotel designers and high-end builders, are so fastidious about content. For the spa in Philippe Starck's Icon Brickell, the icy glass condo tower in Miami, he was asked to wrap 1,500 books in blank white paper, without titles, to provide a "textural accent" to the space. He chose mass-market hardcovers that flood the used book outlets - titles by John Grisham and Danielle Steel - because they are cheap, clean and a nice, generous size.
For another Starck project, in Dallas, Wine used black paper to wrap the 2,000 vintage books he picked for their "distressed edges," so they could be displayed backward.
Book lovers, you can exhale. The printed, bound book has been given a stay of execution by an ! unlikely source: the design community. In this Kindle-and-iPad age, architects, builders and designers are still making spaces with shelves - lots and lots of shelves - and turning to companies like Wines's Juniper Books for help filling them.
The old practice of buying yards of leatherbound law journals or medical texts for an instant library is out of favor. Instead, some designers are finding ever more elaborate ways to tweak books their clients already own.
"German is easy - it's easy to find a complete set of vellum Goethe in the original German," he said. But Wine had to search long and hard to find clean copies of authors like Thackeray, Galsworthy and Conrad. For this client was after more than pretty bindings: he wanted the option of being able to read his books.
The young Upper East Side client of Jenny Fischbach, a design partner at Cullman & Kravis Inc, the tony Manhattan decorating firm, was similarly inclined. She wanted literary classics mixed with art books for a silver-inflected art library. So Wine chose works by Kate Chopin, Jane Austen and Robert Browning and wrapped them in matte silver paper, to match the silver hardware in the room.
Not all of Wine's clients, who include hotel designers and high-end builders, are so fastidious about content. For the spa in Philippe Starck's Icon Brickell, the icy glass condo tower in Miami, he was asked to wrap 1,500 books in blank white paper, without titles, to provide a "textural accent" to the space. He chose mass-market hardcovers that flood the used book outlets - titles by John Grisham and Danielle Steel - because they are cheap, clean and a nice, generous size.
For another Starck project, in Dallas, Wine used black paper to wrap the 2,000 vintage books he picked for their "distressed edges," so they could be displayed backward.
Book lovers, you can exhale. The printed, bound book has been given a stay of execution by an ! unlikely source: the design community. In this Kindle-and-iPad age, architects, builders and designers are still making spaces with shelves - lots and lots of shelves - and turning to companies like Wines's Juniper Books for help filling them.
The old practice of buying yards of leatherbound law journals or medical texts for an instant library is out of favor. Instead, some designers are finding ever more elaborate ways to tweak books their clients already own.
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