At Books by the Foot — a company that sells, as its name suggests, books by the foot — one can purchase books by color (options include “luscious creams,” “vintage cabernet” and “rainbow ombre”), by subject (“well-read art” or “gardening”), wrapped books (covered in linen or rose gold) and more. The tomes are all “rescue books,” ones that would otherwise be discarded or recycled for paper pulp, said Charles Roberts, the president of Books by the Foot’s parent company, Wonder Book.
During the pandemic lockdown in 2020, remote work created increased demand for the company’s services. “People were requesting books for Zoom meetings,” Mr. Roberts said. “They wanted classic literature, cookbooks or other things for their backgrounds, kind of like props but also to reflect their personality and tastes. People wanted to avoid getting made fun of for having a romance novel in their background.”
While it mostly specializes in the sale of real books, the company has also dabbled in the world of faux ones. The book seller has cut books — so only the spines remain — and glued them to shelves for cruise ships, “where they don’t want to have a lot of weight or worry that the books will fall off the shelves if the weather gets bad,” Mr. Roberts said.
There are other, sometimes counterintuitive, uses for fake tomes as well. Although it has the capacity to hold more than 1.35 million of them, many of the books in China’s 360,000-square-foot Tianjin Binhai Library aren’t real. Instead, perforated aluminum plates emblazoned with images of books can be found, primarily on the upper shelves of the atrium. While the presence of artificial books in a place devoted to reading has been widely criticized — “more fiction than books,” one headline mocked — it remains a buzzy tourist attraction. After all, the books don’t need to be real if it’s just for the ’gram.
Tina Ramchandani, an interior designer in New York, said that her firm has used fake books in both commercial and residential settings. For a dressing room in a members-only club in New Jersey, “where nobody was really going to read the books, but where there were bookshelves, we got all fake books,” Ms. Ramchandani said.
