Thursday, September 24, 2020

More Bathroom Books


This is from a gallery of bathroom bookshelves at the decoist website. It makes me want to yell, "Get those damn books away from all that steam and humidity!"

In the same gallery is this hidden secret-door bathroom in a library:


This one annoys me for a different reason: the "library" is fake. It's just a random collection of trash books. Two old encyclopedias, a calculus textbook, a lot of book-club fiction and biography (at least a couple of volumes shelved upside-down), and a whole shelf of Reader's Digest Condensed Books. Nice wallpaper in the bathroom, though.


5 comments:

Trooper York said...

Why is it fake?

I would venture to suggest that is the state of many peoples bookshelves

Not everyone has bookshelves lined with tomes by Thomas Hardy and Dostoevsky.

I mean I have some of that but the bulk would be hard boiled detective novels, westerns and science fiction.


Mumpsimus said...

I'm just going on instinct, Trooper, but I'll bet I'm right. Decorators love to use Reader's Digest Condensed Books because the leatherette bindings are nice-looking and colorful, and the books are easy to find and dirt cheap. Same with the old encyclopedias.

MamaM said...

I have books in my bathroom too, but they're not on shelves. More like a rotating stack on hand. Growing up, the bathroom (there was more than one so there wasn't someone pounding on the door in need) was the quietest place to read undisturbed.

This type of decorating drives me nuts. Same with how the houses on the home repair shows are staged to add color and pattern in ways that aren't sustainable in the long run.

Who do you know that reads Reader's Digest Condensed Books anymore? My mom used to--but then she loved the stories in McCall's and The Ladies Home Journal. She was also big into Appearance Management--which is what this deco is all about.

Fun pic and post though. I'm still ponding on the portable toilet book from the other thread.

Amartel said...

Yeah, these are both examples of something that looks good in principle at first glance, but would never work in real life. The first one is so pretentious, like what you'd see in an Architectural Digest sort of mag selling the fantasy of a room for tub reading but IRL the wood would warp and the books would mold and nobody would actually use the tub because nobody actually tubs anymore unless you're old or recovering from an injury and the books in there would be the ones that no one ever reads. Bathroom books need to be accessible and easy. Also, they should be paperbacks. And one shelf or stack should suffice. Once they're done in the bathroom, their shelf life is over.

MamaM said...

Pondering on the portable toilet! Much more thoughtful and different than the ponding that showed up as the typo!