In normal times, the Brattle Book Shop in downtown Boston offers to curate bookshelves as personal or professional backdrops. Clients have included home-stagers and movie producers as well as individuals simply wanting to make that home library or den that much more aesthetically appealing—or make themselves look smarter.
Now, Brattle is specifically pitching the service to those legions of people now hastily working from home due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. The shop, which traces its roots back nearly 200 years and which specializes in rare and antiquarian titles, first tweeted the offer on April 7.
There had not been any takers as of April 8, but that could change as homebound workers scramble to spruce up all of those Zoom backgrounds that were never supposed to be.
Manager Nicole Reiss hatched the idea with a coworker after they noticed that some Zoom backgrounds—for talking heads on TV, or via stills in various trend pieces—just looked bad at worse, uneven at best. “Some look really good,” Reiss said, “and then some you can just tell they have their college textbooks with the ‘used’ sticker on it, and it just doesn’t have the same gravitas or prestige as a nice book background.”
Reiss and her coworker started joking around about curating bookshelves for video-conferencing—and then realized it might be a real service people need and want. Besides, Brattle Book Shop is closed right now, like so many other businesses amid the pandemic. It is offering internet sales, and will arrange shipping.
The decorating service goes on, too, though with this new Zoom-centric twist. The shop charges by the book, which start at $1 and run to the thousands of dollars each, depending on things such as the title and the material. The bookshop doesn’t need to visit a client’s home but can curate virtually, through photos, and over the phone with information such as dimensions and desired books.
Pro tip, per Reiss: Clients tend to put the bargain books toward the bottom and the more august-looking titles at eye level.
As for those desired books, there are clues as to what people might want in their video-conferencing backdrops via previous Brattle customers’ tastes. Particularly popular? “Leather-bound books that are a lighter color because they can brighten up the room but give it that old-world feel,” Reiss said.
Also popular are vintage decorative cloth bindings—“sort of like a sea-side cottage feel.” Then there are those folks who want contemporary titles, or a run of books on a single-subject, or some mix of all of the above.
“You can tell a lot about a person from their books,” Reiss said.