I am thinking of having my picture taken in front of the Ermenegildo Zegna store at 645 N. Michigan Ave. Frankly, I could use the IQ points.
That establishment, a tony men’s store stocked with extravagantly priced jackets cut from the supple backs of beautifully hued animals, currently features a window adorned with gleaming books — actually, with pictures of gleaming books.
What is, in effect, book-bedecked wallpaper is mounted on two bookshelves illuminated from within, creating a nice theatrical touch. You can tell the objects are supposed to be books, but they don’t distract you with individual, recognizable titles. It’s simply a blur of bookiness — not book after book but bookbookbookbook. They serve as a classy backdrop to the garb whose fetching presence is, after all, the real point of the display. The books are, literally as well as metaphorically, window dressing.
Nothing says taste and intelligence quite like books. The set of NBC’s “Today” show also includes a goodly portion of books arranged discreetly on a shelf, as if to suggest that Kate and Matt are passionate bibliophiles. In the shadow of books, everyone looks smarter.
Other items also seem to do the trick, such as eyeglasses (preferably tortoiseshell with round lenses), but books remain our chief cultural artifact, the preeminent visual indication that we are in the presence of sophistication and refinement.
Each weekday morning as I pass the Ermenegildo Zegna window on my meandering way to Tribune Tower, I find myself wondering two things: First, will books as we now know them continue to serve as captivating cultural symbols even if their physical shape is subsequently altered by electronic innovation? Second, after all these centuries and the emergence of so many other art forms, why are books still fetishized as little chunks of enlightenment?
The first question is easy: Yes. In fact, as the devices by which written material is transported from writers to readers undergo promised revolutions, the familiar, old-fashioned book — that antiquated but still serviceable paper-and-ink combo — will smack even more insistently of the highbrow life. Traditional books likely will become museum objects, owned only by the rich or by august galleries that draw awed, whispering crowds.
The second question, though, is trickier. We know we should respect a variety of preferences, that diversity is desirable. It shouldn’t matter, that is, whether my picture is snapped in front of a bookshelf or at a professional wrestling match. It’s still the same irrepressible me, right?
We do, however, make judgments about each other based on cultural taste. And there is a universal, paper-scissors-rock understanding that movies trump TV, theater trumps movies and books trump everything — even, as Nicholson Baker argues, fake books.
In his essay “Book as Furniture,” Baker pokes gentle fun at the fancy mail order catalogs that use books to dress up their pages. The titles are typically too faint to be discernible, he points out; the cavorting models give no indication of having read the volumes that litter their faux landscapes. But still the books are there, fraught with mysterious cultural meaning.
Certainly reading requires more intelligence than many other activities, but that doesn’t explain much. The fake books in the store window aren’t there to suggest knowledge, after all, but lifestyle: a solitary one. Reading is one of the few arts that requires silence to apprehend it. So many others — attending theater, music, movies, dance — are about public spectacle, about inspired mayhem. Reading means moments apart; books mark the boundary to a place both distant and close. No wonder we’re enraptured.
———-