People have always used books to assert their sophistication and affluence. You need only visit the library of a National Trust property to see that. The novelist F Scott Fitzgerald famously critiqued the shallowness of the super-rich via his character, Jay Gatsby, who lined his shelves with books in order to project a cultured image of himself – yet they were “uncut” and had never been read.
To one guest at Gatsby’s party, that doesn’t matter – he describes the shelves (that he had at first assumed to be cardboard facades of books) as “a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too – didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”
