How Henry Bemis can help give a certain "tone"- or several- to your bookshelves

The Washington Post has an article up on a new trend in custom home library services:

On shelves throughout the land, books are being organized not by topic or author but by the color of their spines. Color-blocking books is a design trend that began a dozen years ago at hotels and in design magazines but continues to grow in popularity. Although it’s a bit of a hot potato in the design world, it’s a popular topic on blogs and on Pinterest. DIYers stalk estate sales for old books, peeling off the jackets to see what color hides underneath. 

The demand has spawned a host of online businesses that will sell you a shelf’s worth of black books for a library or a row of tangerine books for a sun room. One designer recently contacted BooksbytheFoot.com looking for 30 feet of robin’s egg blue books.

 A BooksbytheFoot installation

This is a more economical expression of the library personalizations of Juniper Books' Thatcher Wine, who designs custom dust jackets to turn books into wall art:

Juniper's approach makes the book itself irrelevant. For color blocking sans dust jackets, books need to coexist not just by color but by topics: they need to seem like your books. Or, at least, can: in The Great Gatsby, the character Owl Eyes marvels at the faux-realism of Gatsby's library:

"About that. As a matter of fact you needn't bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They're real." 

"The books?" 

He nodded. 

"Absolutely real- have pages and everything. I thought they'd be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact they're absolutely real. Pages and -- here! Lemme show you." 

Taking our skepticism for granted he rushed to the bookshelf and returned with Volume One of the "Stoddard Lectures." 

"See!" he cried triumphantly. It's a bona fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella's a regular Belasco. It's a triumph. What thoroughness! Knew when to stop too- didn't cut the pages. What do you expect?" 

Granted, there is a place for the purely decorative, the atmospheric. As the Post article notes,

One hotel chain told Martin they wanted red books for all their presidential and ambassador suites. Martin says: “I made a joke. ‘If someone spends $400 a night, and they see a book they want, they might take it with them.’ But it turns out that would not be possible. They were gluing them onto the shelves.”

 Whatever your needs, Henry Bemis can assist you with realizing them. Drop us a note!