{"id":48868,"date":"2025-08-06T22:19:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-06T22:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/48868\/"},"modified":"2025-08-06T22:19:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-06T22:19:10","slug":"bookshelf-wealth-is-a-tiktok-trend-dua-lipas-reading-helen-garner-but-books-have-signified-taste-for-centuries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/48868\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Bookshelf wealth\u2019 is a TikTok trend, Dua Lipa\u2019s reading Helen Garner. But books have signified taste for centuries"},"content":{"rendered":"

Books and bookshelves as interior decoration are a new trend, according to recent reports<\/a>. An expert at Etsy, where some sell books by the metre in order to fill shelves, reports a 19,616% increase in searches for \u201cbook-lover decor\u201d over the past three months, compared with the same time last year. Another \u201cmore bespoke<\/a> service\u201d offers a metre of assorted vintage books, all with orange covers, for \u00a398. <\/p>\n

\u201cBookshelf wealth\u201d is an interior design trend on TikTok<\/a>, too. According to the Guardian, \u201cA bookshelf that looks like an heirloom family collection, complete with art and ornaments, suggests you care about literature and art \u2013 and have time and money to spend on these things.\u201d Even if you don\u2019t read much, you can gesture through your bookshelves to aspirations to culture and good taste. <\/p>\n

Like all bright and not-so-bright new ideas, of course, the use of books and bookshelves as interior decoration has a much older history than its recent online incarnation suggests. Bookshelves as interior decoration \u2013 along with book-of-the-month clubs and discussion of books in popular media \u2013 were 19th and 20th-century trends too, though with important differences.<\/p>\n

Unlike books bought by the metre, those trends could cultivate a genuine interest in reading \u2013 as do some 2025 trends, like the celebrity book club. Helen Garner\u2019s This House of Grief was recently chosen by musician Dua Lipa<\/a> for hers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Dua Lipa has chosen Helen Garner\u2019s This House of Grief for her book club.
\n Drew Gurian\/Invision\/AAP<\/p>\n

Democratising reading<\/p>\n

The imposing library in the gentleman\u2019s stately house in the 19th century is a familiar image. It was a key element in marking one\u2019s arrival in the privileged professional or landed classes.<\/p>\n

At the end of the 19th century, though, book publishing (and book talk) filtered down to middle-class and working-class readers who began to self-educate or to broaden their reading through accessing new books. These changes were brought about by wider education and employment, but also an increase in publishing activity, especially for new novels. (The later invention of the mass-market paperback<\/a>, in the 1930s, would be another landmark.) Readers hunted down the classics, followed reading lists set up by reformist associations, or joined newly opened libraries, which also expanded across this period. <\/p>\n

A new fashion emerged, from the 1920s, for knowing the best, most absorbing or enjoyable of the many new books appearing: modern novels above all. This fashion for the new often existed alongside a desire to know the classics and their authors \u2013 and to display them all in the home.<\/p>\n

Book clubs formed, book programs on the new medium of radio were introduced, and new essays and advertisements about owning and displaying books appeared. Features in newspapers and magazines highlighting the \u201cBook of the Week\u201d or \u201cBook of the Month\u201d became common by the late 1920s. So did essays and advertisements addressed primarily to women readers. Most images, though, showed a man sitting in an armchair surrounded by his homely books.<\/p>\n

A new language emerged too, describing the emerging book worlds as \u201cmiddlebrow\u201d, in contrast to the \u201clowbrow\u201d (those merely following popular or mass tastes) and the highbrow (those whose tastes were only high, refined and, perhaps, pretentious). All three terms could be terms of abuse: usually in feminised forms.<\/p>\n

Harvard Classics<\/p>\n

The volume of new books could provoke anxieties for both established critics and the new readers about \u201cdrowning in a sea of new novels\u201d, alongside new enthusiasms for trying to keep up with the latest. Guidance in reading \u2013 what to read and how to read \u2013 became a new industry. So did guidance on buying and collecting books, and owning them. And, no less important, to displaying them by building a library in your own home.<\/p>\n

In the United States, in 1909\u201310, Charles W. Eliot<\/a>, president of Harvard University, edited the Harvard Classics<\/a>, or Dr Eliot\u2019s Five-Foot Shelf: 50 volumes containing selections of classic works, newly packaged for ordinary and aspiring readers. <\/p>\n

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The Harvard Classics: 50 volumes containing selections of classic works, packaged for ordinary and aspiring readers.
\n Valerius Tygart\/Wikipedia<\/a>, CC BY<\/a><\/p>\n

Authors ranged from Plato to Saint Augustine<\/a>, Dante<\/a> to Milton<\/a>, and included Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe. Subjects ranged from Christian texts, to texts from Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. The total choices were extraordinary (and no doubt daunting for many). Special editions were produced, but cheaper versions appeared over the 1920s and 1930s. <\/p>\n

Harvard Classics were designed for the home. They could be purchased with a five-foot bookshelf to hold them, as well as a booklet giving plans for reading through the collection in just 15 minutes a day. The mix of high culture and easy access to it was one dimension of what would be labelled the middlebrow. The Harvard Classics were available to Australian readers by the 1940s.<\/p>\n

Early book clubs<\/p>\n

The American Book-Of-The-Month Club<\/a>, launched in 1926, was another outstanding success in attracting a new generation of readers. Henry Handel Richardson\u2019s Ultima Thule<\/a> and Eleanor Dark\u2019s The Timeless Land<\/a>, in their US editions, were among the club\u2019s successful monthly choices.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

All About Books, Contents, December 1928.
\n Fryer Library<\/p>\n

In Australia, All About Books<\/a>, launched in 1928, was produced not by a literary critic, but by a key figure in the book trade, bookseller and editor D.W. Thorpe<\/a>. Its aim was to \u201csift the grains of wheat out of so much chaff\u201d \u2013 sort out the good books from the so many new books. Its readers were \u201cordinary readers\u201d, not part of the literary community but eager readers, whether in business or the home, keen to know the best of the latest books.<\/p>\n

It presented recommendations of the best new books (and the rest), plus guides to what was being read in England and the US. All About Books printed short notices, plus slightly longer reviews by noted critics George Cowling and Nettie Palmer on new fiction. Palmer\u2019s column was \u201cA Reader\u2019s Notebook\u201d, while Cowling\u2019s became \u201cAll Sorts of Reading for Everybody\u201d. <\/p>\n

New habits of reading were also linked to new habits of book buying and book owning. The building of a personal library might begin by purchasing the ten-book Masterpiece Library of Short Stories (each book contained two volumes) from the 1920s, or by discerning consumption \u2013 a most important quality to achieve \u2013 of the new books appearing. <\/p>\n

With such abundance, guidance in how to build a personal or \u201cdomestic\u201d library was always needed. All About Books obliged.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The building of a personal library might begin by purchasing the ten-volume Masterpiece Library of Short Stories, from the 1920s.
\n eBay<\/a><\/p>\n

Australian home libraries<\/p>\n

The home became the crucial site for this new book culture, and the frequent recommendation that books and bookshelves made attractive living-room furniture was not simply trivial. These should be good books in good bookshelves, well presented in the domestic space.<\/p>\n

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\u2018Personal Letters from Living Authors\u2019, The Listener In, June 1935.
\n National Library of Australia<\/p>\n

The new book culture was very reader-oriented and often feminised. A weekly book page appeared in the commercial radio paper, The Listener-In<\/a>, edited and written by Miss J.G. Swain, who also presented a weekly radio program: Living Authors. A Book of the Week selection appeared on the Women\u2019s Page, and readers were invited into close relations with \u201cliving authors\u201d.<\/p>\n

As leading historian of Australian reading, Patrick Buckridge, has shown<\/a>, the very successful Australian Women\u2019s Weekly also ran extended pages on good books and good reading from the 1930s to the 1960s. Women readers were specifically addressed, and they were the key participants. <\/p>\n

A worried stenographer wrote to the Weekly, with perfect middlebrow judgement: <\/p>\n

I like biographies, best-sellers, history and travel books and most of the classics, but the girls I have come in contact with cannot be bothered with any of these, and, if they read at all, just read light fiction. (20 July 1940) <\/p>\n

In Buckridge\u2019s words:<\/p>\n

Good books and good reading [were] defined mainly by negation [\u2026] they are what \u201clight fiction\u201d is not. [\u2026] Good books could also be defined [\u2026] as the books that should be owned and kept in the home. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Australian Women\u2019s Weekly, February 1937.
\n National Library of Australia<\/p>\n

This mid-century period in Australia has often been characterised as a period of cultural lack, before the post-war developments in modern literature and art. But looking back now through the vision of reading and publishing history \u2013 and the broad range of cultural institutions \u2013 we see something else. <\/p>\n

We see a period of cultural expansion and diversity: of new books, new readers, new cultural and commercial opportunities.<\/p>\n

Much of this culture around books and reading continued in the post-war decades, in newspaper review pages for example, but criticism was increasingly in the hands of university and other professional critics. The broad public culture around books was divided and much was lost \u2013 until its reinvention with the expansion of book festivals, reading groups, and new forms of reading fandom in recent decades<\/p>\n

\u2018At home with books\u2019<\/p>\n

Books for the home, for the domestic reader, for owning and displaying in home bookshelves, were no doubt involved in forms of social distinction and class affirmation. To be \u201cat home with books\u201d was a demonstrable level of cultural capital.<\/p>\n

But the spread of books and reading also involved forms of democratisation and new kinds of engagement with modern culture. That many of the ideas and the books themselves came from overseas was not a matter of \u201cdomination\u201d, but of wanting to keep up with modern culture as it appeared \u2014 much as we do today.<\/p>\n

In interesting ways, the last two decades have seen something like a resurgence in middlebrow (and \u201chigh pop\u201d) cultural enthusiasms. The word \u201cmiddlebrow\u201d itself has had something of a revival. <\/p>\n

Bookshelves as interior decoration are likely to be with us \u2013 in ever more complicated and design friendly forms \u2013 for quite a long while yet. Bookshelves still have many new and many old stories to tell.<\/p>\n

Most importantly today, the popularity and public presence of a wide range of reading activity \u2013 right across the scale of genres, from literary to popular \u2013 has significant potential to further democratise reading.<\/p>\n