The Next Wave: Print Books as Furniture

NY Times: "It took Thatcher Wine a year to amass 2,000 well-preserved white vellum and cream-colored leather-bound books for a 'gentleman’s library' in the Northern California estate of a private equity manager. Perfectly matched sets of books bound in antique vellum, a pale leather made from goat or sheep skin, are an elusive quarry, especially if they all have to be in English, said Mr. Wine, a former Internet entrepreneur who now creates custom book collections and decorative 'book solutions,' as he puts it, in his Boulder, Colo., warehouse. ... For the spa in Philippe Starck's Icon Brickell, the icy glass condo tower in Miami, he was asked to wrap about 2,000 books in blank white paper, without titles, to provide a 'textural accent' to the space. He chose mass-market hardcovers that flood the used book outlets — titles by John Grisham and Danielle Steel, or biographies of Michael Jackson, he said — because they are cheap, clean and a nice, generous size. ... "