I love being surrounded by books. My favorite study spots are public libraries — the knowledge from all the books seems to permeate the space and seep into my skin. With summer comes a brief reprieve from endless schoolwork, but it always races by faster than anticipated and I become aware of the academic responsibilities looming in my future. Hoping to feel some semblance of productivity, I pulled up some office tours online — the most optimized of setups, the classiest of organization systems. I quickly found an unsurprising commonality in all of the setups I liked: bookshelves. The way they lined the walls and wrapped the corners of all the best office spaces sparked a frenetic, academic inspiration in me, and I looked over at my own bookshelves.
I am quite proud of my collection, accumulated over years of sifting through thrift stores, Dawn Treader excursions, getting distracted at Costco and the occasional splurge at Barnes and Noble. My favorite books are all in a single cube on my shelf, stacked like Tetris blocks so they fill the entire space. The ones at the bottom are all but inaccessible, although it brings me joy to see them there, even if I haven’t touched them in years.
Many of the office setups included paperback box-sets, still wrapped in plastic, sitting in neat rows on shelves — the “display sets.” The actual books, the ones that were actually read, were hidden away; members of an identical set, wedged behind the unopened one. They didn’t match the aesthetic, which was clean and precise. Instead, the well-loved books sat behind glossy plastic to adhere to the expected style.
Truthfully, I like my aesthetic more. I like how my books look worn; I like the overlapping of narratives; I like the frantic sense of academic curiosity imbued in the shelves. I like the juxtaposition between their content and their context; the adventures in the books themselves and the adventures I went on to add them to my collection.
But really, both aesthetics feel contradictory to the profoundness of books. Books are so deeply personal — my life has been forever altered by my encounters with them. I have been exposed to new kinds of people and different mentalities, real and fantastical. Expertly crafted sentences and even single words have made their homes in my brain — I couldn’t evict them if I tried.
It feels wrong to coffee-stain an object like that.
Yet I shove them into backpacks, dog-ear pages (a source of serious online discourse), doodle in the margins and crack their spines. I have committed many serious faux pas in my book storage. It feels almost heretical to admit — maybe instead, I should revere my copies and treat them with the gravity they deserve.
Simultaneously, it feels cheap to designate the purpose of a book to the aesthetic realm. Buying a book you love, while never intending to read that copy, inexorably ties its worth to capital, ownership and property.
In a political theory class earlier this year, I was introduced to a Lockean idea of personhood, defined by the property one owns and the labor one produces. In other words, Locke defined a person as an entity who can claim ownership over its property.
I initially recoiled at the idea; I didn’t like how something as intimate as an identity, a personal identity, could be peeled away until you reached a pulsing core of ownership. I rejected it out of hand. I didn’t want my identity to be billboards and advertising jingles and fluorescent shopping malls. But the idea quickly permeated my mental space and I noticed it appearing everywhere. I forgot to put my watch on and felt weird the whole day. “I don’t feel like myself!!” I texted my friend. I left my sketchbook at home and without its reassuring weight in my pocket, I felt restless, even though I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to use it anyway. I borrowed a top from my friend and changed out of my usual outfit, then instantly felt out of place. When I was not in possession of these items — my items — I felt less like myself.
So maybe Locke is on to something — with each new book I purchase, I feel like I am asymptotically approaching my identity as a “reader.” Additionally, these various indicators of “bookish” cultures can be socially advantageous. There is a lingering sense of grandiosity when you encounter an expansive book collection, and the owner’s identity is subconsciously linked to sophistication and heightened intellectual priority. Engaging in aesthetics of books, albeit not engaging with the books themselves, allows one to fit into academic communities and offers a point of connection to people with similar interests. I am overjoyed when I discover a book collection of a new friend. Just as office tours make me feel more productive, being in a space filled with books evokes feelings of intellectual accomplishment.
Reading communities online — BookTok, BookTube, Bookstagram — perpetuate this phenomenon of ownership. Book hauls, bookshelf tours and book subscription boxes such as Illumicrate are staples of these communities, displaying a culture of rampant consumerism. It’s common to collect multiple exclusive editions of books, displaying rows of non-identical covers with identical insides. Influencers often go on “book-buying bans” when they recognize the financial burden and disconnect between buying and reading. A user commenting on Withcindy’s video “why i only own 4 books 💸 a chat on booktube consumerism” says that “before watching/starting booktube, I never really felt the need to physically own any of the books that I read. After seeing all these people with their pretty hardbacks and gushing about book mail all the time, I kinda felt left out.” Publishing companies seem to be aware of readers’ desire to “aesthetic-ify” their hobby — they are, after all, the ones releasing exclusive editions of popular books — and the cycle perpetuates itself.
Aestheticism online is just consumerism. Aesthetics and microtrends dominate internet culture, and alongside them, companies jostle for a crumb of the hype. Barnes and Noble has a BookTok section in their stores, aware of the vast influence this online community has on their consumer base.
Reading is a completely free hobby; it has no starting investment, so the consumerist culture embedded in its online community is interesting. In elementary school, before owning any books of my own, I went next door to my local library on a weekly basis. I read more back then, too. For free. I was not concerned with the taped-on dust jackets, stains, or out-of-style deckled edges. I only cared about the ink on the page, the story held within the covers.
Yet there is something to be said for the delight one finds in making their space beautiful. Being surrounded by books as I work brings me a sense of joy. However, the aesthetic side of reading is a separate entity from reading itself. When floating in that listless state, absorbed completely in the story in the pages, the physical nature of the book does not matter.
There is the option of disengaging from aesthetics entirely and trying to discern where the value in a book actually comes from. A pristine box set doesn’t have worth because it has never been opened. My books don’t have worth because of their signs of usage. And a collector’s edition doesn’t have value because it has sprayed edges or gold gilding. A book has value for the story it tells; its true worth is something beyond physicality. Its origin and condition are irrelevant. My identity and relationship to reading should be tied to just that: reading, not to ownership or aesthetic. The book doesn’t matter — you can just read.
Statement Columnist Eleanor Barrett can be reached at egbarr@umich.edu.
