Stories about people with miles of empty bookshelves that need to be stocked by designers have been known to make us laugh and cry at the same time. This one, by Penelope Green, almost reached a satisfactory solution of the content/object problem that books have posed ever since rich people paid illuminators.

Mr. Wine, who is more of a library artist than a mere book dealer, and who can swathe a book in just about anything, had fun last month wrapping the autobiographies of Keith Richards and Jay-Z in old-fashioned red leather. It’s a practice that irritates book designers like Chip Kidd, who creates noted covers for Knopf.

“It feels sort of needlessly complicated, like turning on the vacuum cleaner and going and finding a piece of dirt,” Mr. Kidd said. “You don’t have to redesign the jacket; the jackets have been designed. This feels arbitrary, like taking a piece of wood and wrapping it in paper.”

The next paragraph, instead of lurching off into Restoration Hardware’s much-mocked “book bundle,” ought to have taken us to libraries composed of  books designed by Chip Kidd. There must be a few them about somewhere.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 6th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.