Larsen Idealog

Judge these books by their cover

Looking for good-looking books? For $400 a foot, you can “install” a handsome antique leather library in your home courtesy of the Strand Bookstore’s Books-by-the-Foot service.

Beyond your budget? For $250 a foot, you can fill your home (well, part of it anyway) with attractive art books like those shown above — everything from Basquat to Brassai and Pollock to Picasso.

Still a bit pricey? $30 a foot stocks your shelves with “contemporary” fiction. Looking closely at the Books-by-the-Foot photo of the contemporary fiction lineup, I see titles by Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Tom Clancy, and Saul Bellow. Hmmm. Not sure any of the Bellow readers I know are Clancy readers. But then again, this isn’t really about reading, is it?

I’m thinking this $30-a-foot collection looks a bit like a literary survey course no one would put together.

Best deal? $10 a foot, which gets the more cosmopolitan among us, “hardcover books in good, clean condition representing a variety of colors and subjects.” Only you don’t get to choose the colors or the subjects.

Imagine that. It’s your library and you don’t get to choose the colors. Am I the only one who hasn’t yet organized my library like, um, my closet? Green books, red books, yellow books, black books….

I learned of Books-by-the-Foot from Austin Kelley’s recent Talk of the Town article in The New Yorker, Books in Bulk. And, not surprisingly, the service is not for regular readers like me, but for busy celebrities — real and fictional.  As Kelley notes, “For Indiana Jones, the filmmakers specified that the books cover such topics as paleontology, marine biology, and pre-Columbian society. They had to be in muted colors and predate 1957.”

Imagine the Library of Congress running itself like this.

— That's words on words.