Peter Robins on Swedish Books at Ikea

Writing on the internet is perhaps the best medium ever devised for the asking of silly questions. They call it the lazyweb: your query hangs in the ether until a day when the one person in the world who understands the subject happens to Google herself, and she arrives at your site with the answer.

Here, then, is a silly question. Exactly what proportion of Sweden’s remaindered books end up being sold to Ikea?

It could be substantial, was my first thought. Every branch of Ikea I’ve visited dresses its many living-room sets with shelves full of handsome Swedish-language hardbacks. This is a worldwide chain. That’s a lot of copies of Nordic Birds, part one. And these are real Swedish-language hardbacks, not merely Scandinavian wrappers around Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. I’ve checked. (Going around Ikea can get dull.)

On the other hand, it’s not as if every branch of Ikea has to refresh its range of Swedish hardbacks. The ones I opened in my shelf-nosying expedition had publication dates between 1985 and 1997. Maybe Ingvar Kamprad bought the entire contents of some dusty distributor’s warehouse, at a heavy discount, some time in the late 1990s, and has subsisted on it ever since. Slightly outdated books are not, after all, a design faux pas in the way that a slightly outdated television might be. On the contrary. They imply re-reading. The suspicious version is those spreads in style magazines, where every book is a just-published Rem Koolhaas retrospective, in mint condition and, I imagine, destined to remain so.

Books, considered as furniture, have the advantage of conveying a great deal of information about their owner. Their main disadvantage is the same. Consider The Guardian’s recent, acidic analysis of the books visible in a photoshoot at David Cameron’s home. They had their interiors writers analyse the rest of his furniture (lots of John Lewis) but it was on the bookshelves that they found all the most damaging inferences.

The problem becomes more acute when the space is imaginary — an Ikea room display, a spread in an interiors magazine, a film or theatre set — and the books are an expression of an idealised fictional personality, rather than the excretion of a real one. (Even the books you have bought but not read say rather a lot about you.) Merely looking for impressive bindings, like the people who supply books-by-the-yard to pubs, won’t do, because some of us are watching the spines, and as soon as there’s a close-up we will begin to wonder what it is about this particular maverick detective that draws him to incomplete sets of 1950s children’s encyclopedias, or Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. (The Condensed Books, frankly, we can recognise even in a medium shot.)

Getting it right may be even more distracting. A few months ago I went to see the revival of ‘The Common Pursuit’, Simon Gray’s play set around the life-cycle of a New Review-like literary magazine. Bookshelves were prominent on the set. Lots of impressive spines. From a few rows back in the audience — it was stalls only: this was the Menier Chocolate Factory — I involuntarily began trying to spot Condensed Books. Indeed, at first I thought I’d seen some. But they turned out, once I strained a little, to have been more sophisticated than that, including nothing too obviously identifiable as wrong and even managing some fake dustcovers for the Lowell-like American poet who plays a part in the plot. I was pleased. Naturally, however, I don’t remember much else about the performance.

And this is the genius of Ikea’s Swedish hardbacks — the real reason that it is worth importing them to whatever country is to be conquered this month, rather than picking up a consignment of native remainders, which would almost certainly be cheaper. They convey the presence of literature without any other sociological or psychological implications — without even the hope of finding such implications, unless you take the trouble of learning Swedish before you shop. They are less expensive than an artfully placed e-reader, and yet there is no risk that anyone will ever steal them, or diagnose them as embarrassingly obsolete. They are eternal, inscrutable, universal.

In fact, thinking about it, the only place where Swedish hardbacks would be inadequate as set-dressing is Sweden. Which leaves me with a second silly question. Do home-country branches of Ikea have Reader’s Digest Condensed Books?