In our last post we followed the spine from hidden hinge to the side of the book that faces the room. Once it got there, something else happened almost straight away. People stopped seeing spines only as labels and started treating them as decoration, sometimes to the point of not needing a book behind them at all.
Pepys and his stilts
Samuel Pepys was particular about most things, and his library was no exception. He commissioned his first oak bookcases in 1666, some of the earliest surviving bookcases in the modern sense, and arranged his 3,000-odd books by size rather than subject, smallest to largest. Shorter books spoilt the line along the top of a shelf, so he had wooden blocks made to stand them on, each one covered in tooled leather so that it looked like the spine of another book. The library is still at Magdalene College, Cambridge, exactly as he left it, stilts and all.
Doors that look like books
If a row of spines looks good, a row of fake ones can hide a door. In 1831 the 6th Duke of Devonshire wanted something better than "the tired old labels" on the dummy bookcases in the library at Chatsworth, which disguise the doors to the gallery stairs. He asked the poet and punster Thomas Hood to come up with titles. Hood's include John Knox on Death's Door and Percy Vere "in 15 large volumes", and in the early 1960s Patrick Leigh Fermor added a fresh batch, Experiences in China by Earl Grey among them.
Charles Dickens liked the trick so much he did it twice: first at Tavistock Square, then in his study at Gad's Hill, with spines made up by his bookbinder to his own instructions. The shelves include Cat's Lives in nine volumes, History of a Short Chancery Suit in 21, and The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, whose volumes are titled Ignorance, Superstition, The Block, The Stake, The Rack, Dirt, and Disease. Next to it, The Virtues of Our Ancestors sits on a spine that is very narrow indeed.
Bought by the foot
The less charming relation of the fake spine is the real book bought only for its spine. For as long as there have been grand libraries, people have filled shelves with matching leather sets chosen for colour and height rather than contents. It still goes on: decorators, film sets, and hotel lobbies buy books by the metre, and some bookshops sell them by length rather than title. It's easy to be sniffy about, but it says something about how much a run of good spines changes the feel of a room.
Spines meant to be seen
Publishers have long understood that a series should look good lined up together. When Penguin launched its Clothbound Classics in 2008, designer Coralie Bickford-Smith went back to Victorian publishers' cloth bindings for inspiration, with foil-stamped patterns on coloured cloth, designed to look as good together on a shelf as each one does on its own. She wanted to make "a hardback that was really loved", and the series has gone on to sell millions of copies, many of them bought partly for how they look on a shelf. Arranging books by colour into a rainbow is the same instinct taken a step further. It annoys some readers, delights others, and is really just Pepys's stilts with a better palette.
So, does it matter what's inside?
Probably, yes. But we've never managed to be cross with Pepys and his leather blocks, or with anyone who's bought a run of green spines because they suited the room. A full shelf is one of the nicest things to look at in a house, read or not. That's really what our book and reading prints are — shelves you hang rather than fill — and if you know someone who'd always rather be reading, one of our books and reading cards is a decent excuse to send them something.
