Bookshelf Wallpaper

This is just stupid... Give me a plain white wall any day! To me this looks like clutter – with no benefit of anything useful, like, I don't know... Actual books.

This just in... I recall the "library" in Casa Loma in Toronto. The guy went bankrupt building the house, and it's a practically empty building. Instead of books, the walls of the library were made to look like huge plaster books - no titles or anything that fancy - it was a complete letdown. The room was meant more as a place to dance and look like a library.

Go to anybody's bookshelf and you get a feeling for who they are (or who they want to be). The wallpaper just says "I want to appear literate, but I have no depth".

Reminds me of the moon surface wallpaper people used to have, except pretentious.

Will people ask "Why do you have six copies of the Great Gatsby"?

If you're going to use those, just tattoo STOOPID on your forehead. It's way quicker and probably cheaper.

The Freakonomics guys claim that the mere presence of books in the house, more than parents' time spent reading to children, predicts a child's good performance in school. How about the appearance the presence of books?