Natalie Portman uses the domino run effect to suggest an active book shelf. Oh, she says, did my taking down a book cause that? How unfortunate. That's always happening. pic.twitter.com/QaafnK1hzc
— Bookcase Credibility (@BCredibility) December 3, 2020
Bookcase Credibility is a Twitter account that judges famous people for the books that appear in the background of their Zoom or WebEx video conferences. It's an inevitable practice, as the new ways of telework inevitably bringing the world into your home to judge you for your interior design choices. Or, more specifically, your intellectual rigor and home library organization skills.
So it's now important to not only dress well and furnish your office to look professional. Now even your bookcase has to impress people. Now you could read respected academic works that expand your mind. But that takes time and is boring. Instead, just have the service Books by the Foot send you a curated collection of books that subtly deceive people you work with into thinking that you're smart.
Books by the Foot, which is operated by a company called Wonder Book has been in business for many years, but quarantine life has given its services only greater importance. Politico reports:
The Wonder Book staff doesn’t pry too much into which objective a particular client is after. If an order were to come in for, say, 12 feet of books about politics, specifically with a progressive or liberal tilt—as one did in August—Wonder Book’s manager, Jessica Bowman, would simply send one of her more politics-savvy staffers to the enormous box labeled “Politically Incorrect” (the name of Books by the Foot’s politics package) to select about 120 books by authors like Hillary Clinton, Bill Maher, Al Franken and Bob Woodward. The books would then be “staged,” or arranged with the same care a florist might extend to a bouquet of flowers, on a library cart; double-checked by a second staffer; and then shipped off to the residence or commercial space where they would eventually be shelved and displayed (or shelved and taken down to read).
Only sometimes do Bowman and Wonder Book President Chuck Roberts know the real identity of the person whose home or project they’ve outfitted: “When we work with certain designers, I pretty much already know it’s going to be either an A-list movie or an A-list client. They always order under some code name,” Bowman says. “They’re very secretive.”
Visually-appealing book arrangements are important for more than just video conference calls. Books by the Foot also provides scenic backgrounds for offices on TV shows and movies:
Books by the Foot’s creations have also popped up in a variety of TV shows and movies, many of them politics-adjacent. “Madam Secretary,” “Veep,” “The Blacklist,” “House of Cards,” as well as the 2017 movie Chappaquiddick, for example, have all outfitted their sets with Books by the Foot curations. Some of the most high-profile projects the team works on, however, aren’t revealed to them until after the fact: Bowman has had the distinctly surreal experience of watching a movie for the first time and recognizing her work onscreen. (That’s how it works, she said, with “pretty much anything Marvel.”)
-via Althouse