“Oh, my God, real books!” a friend who is an interior designer observed ironically as he walked into my parent’s living room. “They’re academics,” I explained, knowing exactly what he meant. Unfortunately, a real library full of “real” books is all too rare these days. Quite apart from the pleasure that reading brings, a library adds visual interest, color and warmth to a house. It also suggests that the owners are cultured in a way that a TV in the living room clearly does not. Or maybe it suggests that people who have libraries are old fashioned, while the culture has moved increasingly towards the cult of the visual image and the sound bite. Of course, one can have a library that is largely decorative. My grandfather’s was full of precious leather volumes many of which he had never read. He simply liked the look and feel of old books and the idea of a handsome library.

But if my parents have “real” books, then what did my friend consider to be “unreal” books? Most likely, he was thinking of coffee table books. It may be unfair, but I know exactly what he means. Most coffee table books aren’t meant to be read any more than articles in Playboy are meant to be read. It’s the pictures that are important.

Leaf through any design magazine and you see that almost all coffee tables have large books on them (usually in piles of two or three). There is invariably a book on Avedon, Hadley, Jansen, or one of the great modernist painters. You know because the photographer turns the books so you can read the spines. Sometimes I wonder, do these books really belong to the owners of the place? Or do the photographers for the magazines take the same five books to every shoot? What one can’t help but notice is that the art in the coffee table books is invariably better than that on people’s walls. This of course is understandable, but it’s as if people are saying: “if I could afford it I wouldn’t have what you see on my walls. This is what I would have.” So the coffee table book is a coded message about what sort of person one would be if money were no object. Perhaps also the these books have another message as well; that is, even if you don’t like the way that I’ve decorated my house, at least you can’t doubt that I have taste, because I like Picasso.

I’m not saying that people who have picture books don’t get genuine pleasure from their books, but clearly there is something more going on as well. And that includes not only the coded messages about taste, but also the fact that such books have become a decorative necessity, an accessory that must go on every coffee table. A coffee table simply wouldn’t look right without a coffee table book sitting on it. It isn’t just the contents of the books that suggest taste and savoir faire, but the placement of the books themselves that suggests this.

And yet, when everyone does the same thing you can be sure that it isn’t a matter of individual taste. The irony, and of course this is the great irony of consumer culture more generally, is that we show our individual good taste by following the shifting fashions of collective good taste as defined by the tastemakers. Design magazines continually reinforce the idea that a proper coffee table must have certain types of books on it arranged in certain sorts of piles. This, we tell people, is what good taste looks like. But maybe it’s just what people in the U.S. and Britain think is good taste. I say this because in browsing through some French and Italian design magazines, I notice that on the continent it is apparently possible to be a person of taste and not have coffee table books! I have no idea why.

Bespoke Semi Circular Atlas Sofa by James Duncan

Do you have a couch or a sofa? Some claim that they are not the same thing. Others think a sofa is simply an up-market couch.* But most Americans use the terms interchangeably. Actually the two terms have an interesting history, and so does the furniture they refer to.

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The word couch comes from the French word “coucher”, to lie down, and this is the word that came first into the English language. This isn’t surprising, as nearly 50% of French and English words have a common root. So, in 1450 the English had couches, but had never heard of sofas. The French, on the other hand call them canapés, not couches. To confuse things further, a canapé in English is usually finger food. But this comes from the fact that a bit of savory is placed upon a “couch” of bread.

In the seventeenth century, when an infatuation with all things Oriental began to sweep the elites of Europe, the word sofa, derived from the Arabic word “suffah”, meaning a long reclining bench began to be used. Wealthy people sat on their sofas and drank coffee, a newly fashionable beverage, also borrowed around that time from the Arabs and the Turks.

The sofa has been around for several thousand years. The ancient Greeks and later Roman men lounged on sofas when they dined. This privilege was restricted to men; women sat on chairs to eat.

The “modern” style of sofa wasn’t developed until the late sixteenth century, when wooden frames were padded with feathers and horsehair, introduced by the Germans, or dried sea moss, favored by the English. The seats and backs were then wrapped in burlap and covered in rich velvet, wool or silk. These early modern sofas were very expensive and consequently were the prerogative of elites in Europe. The other classes had to make do with benches, chairs and stools. Sofas were no longer used at the dining table, as in Roman times, although cushioned benches with backs sometimes were, which begs the question of where a bench ends and a sofa begins. But, sofas, as in Roman times were used for reclining, rather than sitting. Before the nineteenth century, they were much more likely to be found in bedrooms, where the leisured classes lolled during the day entertaining family and intimate friends. The sofa at this time not only symbolized luxury, but as it was in the boudoir, it had a whiff of decadence and eroticism about it.

Gondole Sofa By James Duncan

During the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution dramatically lowered the price of sofas, putting them within reach of the rising middle class. Not only did new industrial production make sofas cheaper, it also, with the introduction of the coil spring in 1850, made them more comfortable. But while this new class wanted to emulate the consumption styles of the elite, they did not have the vast sleeping spaces of the wealthy so put their sofas in the larger public rooms of the house. And since these sofas were considered very luxurious by the middle class, they were kept in the parlor to be used by important guests. There was no question of children lounging around on them as they do today.

Bespoke Montreal Sofa by James Duncan

During the twentieth century, as the price of sofas relative to middle class incomes once again dropped dramatically, the sofa became the piece of furniture most associated with the family. This was a total reversal of the nineteenth century sofa. Then, it was where one had polite conversations with guests. Now, in many households, it is where the family sits to watch the greatest conversation killer, the TV.

Tristan Sofa by James Duncan

Ironically, the modern couch potato, lounging around all day on the sofa, takes us back to the pre-nineteenth century use of the sofa as a place of solitary recline. But this isn’t the only contemporary resonance with the past. One can also see in high end sofas, a return to a nineteenth century elegance where the sofa is a more formal piece of furniture than the over-stuffed, comfy, family models that prevail on sitcoms. And again at the high end, the trend to put a sofa in a bedroom, takes us back to eighteenth century customs. And just as it did in the eighteenth century, the sofa in the bedroom suggests glamour touched by eroticism. Plus ca change; plus c’est la meme chose!

Atlas Sofa by James Duncan

*In the 1950’s Nancy Mitford published a list of U and non U (upper class and non upper class) words used in England at that time. Sofa was identified as U while couch or settee were identified as non U.