Enhance your calm, booklovers. This just means a bonanza of second-hand books going on sale when they redecorate next year.

It is easy to be snobby about people who fill their bookshelves in this way – but “we’ve all got lots of books on our shelves that we haven’t read,” Hubbard points out

I think I've read everything I have on my bookshelf outside of some fiction books, almost entirely by Neal Stephenson (I ordered everything he wrote based on how much I liked his early stuff, then didn't like his later stuff as much as I did his earlier), a few books that I was gifted and didn't want but also felt guilty about throwing out, and some reference works that aren't really intended to be read straight through.

I do have ebooks that I haven't read, though.

Oh, and there's a textbook on statistics that I never finished.

There are maybe three books in the queue that haven't made it to the bookshelf, one on war planning in the early 1900s, one on political economics, and maybe one or two others.

EDIT: and somewhere around the house I have my currently-in-progress book on Cold War-era submarine design, but that hasn't made it to the bookshelf either.

If I go to someone's house and I see them using books solely as decoration, propped in that way where you couldn't even read them if you wanted to with vases on top of them etc, I cringe so hard. They think it makes them look sophisticated when in reality it makes them look completely illiterate.

Is this necessarily a bad thing?

Yes.

Yes it is.

Being a poseur has always been a bad thing and always will be a bad thing.