How soon till the wackos start saying that having books is racist and/or classist?
How Bookshelf Wealth Became the Ultimate Status Symbol
This year, the ultimate status symbol isn’t having a Ferrari, or a Rolex, or even an expensive designer bag. According to TikTok, the ultimate flex is owning a great number of books and—this is critical—staging them well.
Since its inception in early 2024, the term ‘bookshelf wealth’ has racked up 1.9 million views on TikTok, inundating one’s social media algorithm with cozy rooms worthy of a Vanderbilt estate. Think sinkable armchairs, patterned wallpaper, sophisticated-looking decor objects, fine artwork, and, of course, many books.
Books have long been associated with intellect and prestige, but today, they are more than just literary treasures. The way they are arranged and showcased can speak volumes about the homeowner’s style. Whether you’re an avid reader or simply want to present an air of refinement, a well-styled bookshelf can serve as the focal point of a room, conveying a sense of affluence and cultural depth. Inherent in this look, we must add, one must actually like to read.
While the bookshelf wealth trend celebrates the culture and presence of books, there’s also a design element to it. It’s not about cramming your shelves full. Instead, the key lies in thoughtful curation, as well as consideration of the room’s overall aesthetic, from seating to textiles to interesting objects.
If you, too, have deliberately avoided the Kindle world and continue to treasure the physical beauty of books, own that in your personal space. Ahead, we’re sharing six utterly novel ways to achieve the bookshelf wealth look in your home.
You know most of these TikTok wackos aren’t actually reading them, for the most part. They’re just spending lots of money on books to look TikTok hip, that they’re special. I have 3 different book shelves, maybe a 100 books left, having given away quite a few to the library when I moved to the house from an apartment in 2009. And all the ones I left at the parents house. I also would get more from the library. Now I am mostly Kindle. I don’t have them on the shelves for status: I read them all. It’s comfy looking at them. It’s not about status. On the bright side, surveys show that young folks are actually reading more these days, so, I like that. I read about 75-90 a year.
Anyhow, if you visit the article you’ll truly get the idea that it’s all about the visuals for the TikTokers, for clout, not for saying “yup, I read them.”
I have no idea how to access tiktok, twitter, instagram etc.
Use Google
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[…] Now The TikTokers Are Ruining Books With “Book Wealth” […]
This is nothing new. I remember a decorating site years ago where you could order books by the foot. You could select the books by color of spine, same size or random size, hardbound or paperback, all to fit your room’s motif.
There was a time when a curated collection of books was an indication of LITERACY. The indication was that you had read all those books, and thus learned what was in them, and not just frittered away your day on TicToc. So naturally, TicToc (and other social media) culture would attempt to denigrate those who have a superior culture to their own.
During the Covidiocy panicdemic, you could — and still can — order the hoitiest and toitiest of Zoom videoconferencing backgrounds, including those faking having a dramatic personal library. Alas! Neither Fox News nor MSNBC asked me for a Zoom appearance, so I never needed to hide our fixer-upper and my extremely messy desk from public view.
When we moved from the Keystone State, we downsized by about 500 ft², and disposed of over a thousand books. Many were read-to-death paperbacks, but some good hardbacks were given to the Catholic school library. Now, as our esteemed host noted is his case as well, my library is mostly on the Kindle reader on my tablet.
Heck, I even got rid of my 1970s college notebooks, which I still had. Several boxes of stuff that had been packed 15 years earlier when we moved to Pennsylvania and had never been unpacked went to the dump.
I have been collecting books since the 70s, when I started making a little money. I find it one of the best things that a person can do. You might not read all of them, but it is surprising that they go out of circulation so fast. Many people reference these out of publication books, and it is fun to discount their papers as they often intentionally leave out material that would be opposite to what they are trying to promote. A good example is climate change. Prior to the obsession with carbon, the books on ice ages and major shifts in hot and cold, there was no mention of CO2. And they had CO2 back then.
LOL. Still whining about global warming? You’ve won! King Donald has shut it all down! Drill baby drill!
The US is/was the world leader. When we start spewing more greenhouse gases so will others. Let us hope for our sake that every climate scientist, major religion, government, scientific organization and NGO is wrong and the stable genius, King Donald I, is right!
So old books didn’t mention CO2 dependent global warming? Neither did the ancient Abrahamic holy books mention dinosaurs, the expanding universe, nuclear power, vaccines or genetic engineering. BTW, in 1896 Swedish Professor Svante Arrhenius published “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground,“a groundbreaking study that quantified the contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse effect and explored the potential impact of CO2 variations on long-term climate changes. That’s nearly 130 years ago.
Jeff,
Old books like from the 90s that are still used as reference, or from the early 2000s? The period before the attempt to take over the world with environmental communism, like you practice. Your reference was proven false.
Porter,
You can relax! King Donald and the fascists won! No supporter is allowed to understand the threat of global warming! But you won’t have the “scam” to blame for the decline!
The IPCC was formed in 1988. Since the collapse of the Soviet union there are only a few formally communist nations remaining… China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos. Russia and their satellites abandoned communism but some retained their authoritarian/fascist ways, like you and your King practice.
“Freed” states were Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Belarus remains the most tightly aligned to Putin. If Trump abandons Ukraine to Putin, the Baltics are likely to be at risk.
Do you believe King Donald would risk anything to help NATO defend Latvia? LOL.
Our neocon from north of Arkansas wrote:
In 1939, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Republic of France gave an unconditional guarantee to Poland that they would defend the Poles’ independence. Two days after the Nazis invaded, the UK and France declared war on Germany, not a single British or French soldier, sailor, airman, or Marine ever fought in Poland to defend the country from the Third Reich! If der Führer hadn’t been stupid and invaded the USSR, it’s quite possible that the Nazis would still be in control of Poland, and all of Europe.
The NATO alliance was signed in April of 1949, when it was guesstimated that the Soviets were still at least five years away from developing an atomic bomb; in August of 1949, they test detonated their first nuclear weapon. NATO continued, preparing for the pouring of Soviet tanks through the Fulda Gap, to invade West Germany and the rest of democratic Europe, but it was always known that the USSR had a huge advantage in tanks and men, and it would require the United States, coming from 3,000 miles away to defend against this huge conventional attack.
As the USSR fell, and shrank to Russia itself, NATO added members, and is now supposed to defend the tiny Baltic States, directly on Russia’s border, which raises the obvious question: how can that be done? How do we defend Estonia, population 1.37 million, against a massive, even if inept, Russian army? Are we really willing to attack a nation with a strategic nuclear arsenal to defend that tiny country?
Remember: while the US, UK, and France, all nations with their own nuclear deterrent force, have been willing to provide money and equipment, but none have sent a single soldier to help defend Ukraine, a large nation with a population of 43 million souls.
Ukraine isn’t a NATO nation, so we have no obligation to defend it, which makes that situation different from the Baltic States, but to defend those nations still requires a reasonable and workable plan, not just a commitment. Me? I can’t think of how we would do so. Of course, I’m not even an armchair general, but if there is a solid and reasonable defense plan, I’ve never heard of it.
The United States has the same kind of defense commitment to the Republic of China, but while Formosa is roughly 100 miles from the coast of the People’s Republic, it’s 6,000 miles from the California coast. Before Red China had a deliverable nuclear force, our defense commitment could include the use of nuclear weapons, but China now has the strategic nuclear force which can hit the United States. What is the reasonable plan to defend Taiwan?
With a six month buildup that Saddam Hussein couldn’t prevent, we were able to expel the Iraqi forces from Kuwait, though the elder President Bush stopped the war too soon, and left the butcher of Baghdad still in control. It was up to the younger President Bush to depose Mr Hussein and the Ba’ath Party regime, but in the end, Iraq is still an authoritarian dictatorship. We had to go into Afghanistan to destroy al Qaeda, which we did, but after twenty years of war, the Taliban are back in charge of Afghanistan.
If we couldn’t liberate Iraq and Afghanistan and turn them into reasonable Westernized democracies, how the f(ornicate) are we expected to be able to defeat Red China or Russia?
This problem is something few people really want to address, but is something that President Trump intellectually realizes. Unlike some of our past Presidents, he’s truly war-averse, which ought to be considered a good thing, but he still had our troops involved in the fighting in Afghanistan and Syria; my older daughter was in Afghanistan! He also saw that, despite our great military power, all we were able to do was pinprick attacks and we gained absolutely nothing in either Afghanistan and Syria. He wound up negotiating our withdrawal from Afghanistan, the one the dummkopf from Delaware botched, though it’s at least possible that things would have gone just as badly in that operation had Mr Trump won the 2020 election.
All those years, all those men, and all that treasure, expended for virtually nothing. President Trump saw that, and it only reaffirmed his war-averse nature.
All of the chest-thumping and posturing I’ve seen, over Ukraine and Russia’s evil Vladimir Putin, yet no one seems to have any flaming idea how to actually win that war without risking nuclear fire raining down. Perhaps our optimist from the Ozarks can tell us how he would do things, but nobody else seems to have been able to tell me.
[…] Elwood P Dowd is one of the liberal commenters on my good friend William Teach’s The Pirate’s Cove. The distinguished Mr Dowd is a Democrat and true hater of President Trump, and every so often, he gets me rolling in my response. He wrote: […]