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Transforming beautiful rooms with books

 

We continue to be absolutely delighted with the reception we have received with this venture! It is tremendous to see, in this digital age, that books remain as popular as ever as a means of providing style, interest and ambience to rooms which could, otherwise, feel a little soulless or empty.  We are seeing beautiful rooms completely transformed by shelves filled with our books in a huge variety of covers; we have colour coded office meeting rooms to match a new décor, given a pleasing vintage look to a library with antiquarian leather and cloth books and provided hundreds of books with smart, coordinating, textured covers with gold and black titling – these looked particularly impressive. In an age where a designed interior is almost a must have, we are able to help with a finishing touch which really make a scheme sing.

 

And we are learning a lot – not only about the technical specifications which are critical for books to fit specific shelving (we take enormous care with the sizing of our books and covers to ensure the finished product looks as perfect as we can make it) but also about current trends in colours and textures. We make our service entirely personal and work closely with clients and their designers to ensure that this finishing touch to a room really does enhance it. We are always happy to mix styles and colours and even, if requested, to assist with layout ideas. One of the most useful things we can offer (and where we have the advantage over the more traditional “fake” books) is to enable books to be used not only for their traditional “library” purpose but as props in other contexts – we recently worked with a very well known department store chain who are using are colour wrapped books for product display (they do look very good!).

 

We have been having fun (quite hard work but fun nonetheless) identifying titles for specific subjects required by clients for their embossed titled books. Books on architecture, travel, gardening are just some of the areas we have been delving into with some very interesting finds along the way. We of course look only to out of copyright books for these and have found some hidden gems which are so evocative of subject and era; “Foreign Devils on the Silk Road” is just crying out to be read!

 

Thrilled by the positive response to the website and so pleased to do something to help ensure the survival of the printed book, we continue to develop new ideas for covers and also to source runs of some of the beautiful books (paperback and hardback) which were published in early decades of the 20th century.  These make wonderful displays and are increasingly becoming quite collectible so, with a bit of luck, your design enhancement could, in time, become a bit of an investment.

 

FILLING SHELVES!

Filling Shelves!

 

We have been delighted with the response to BooksbyMetre and are thrilled to know that many metres of our books are now on display in hotels, show houses, offices and shops. It has been great fun working with hugely talented designers and architects and to be able to help them make their visions a reality. Feedback has been very complimentary which has not only pleased us enormously but has been very informative and will help us extend our product range to meet the wide range of styles and settings for which we are asked to provide books.

 

We have been very interested to see the varying ways in which our books are displayed; although the basic requirement is for books simply to fill shelves in a traditional format, we have also seen our books piled up and used as “show” platforms for other products; displayed in a “structural” format to make a statement piece; used decoratively as table accessories. There seems to be no end of possible formats and colour combinations of books within a decorative setting and we are full of admiration for the flair and ingenuity applied to make the simple book a piece of art.

 

And this is where we believe we can provide an advantage to designers – indeed anyone who wants to “finish” a setting by using books. As all our books are “real” books the display possibilities are as boundless as imagination. We can provide books in various sizes, a very wide range of colours and textures and our print and embossing capacity means that bespoke personalisation is simple and affordable.

 

We understand that accessories are the last step in the design process and we are very responsive to and can meet short timetables – one recent order demanded a substantial number of  bespoke books in a day which were delivered on time. We understand also that a very personal service is critical to our customers and we are happy to look at shelf and room plans and to assist with the calculation of numbers and dimensions of books. We are very proud of what we do and never forget that when our books are on display, so are we.
WELCOME

Welcome to our first blog for our new venture, Books by Metre. We are enormously excited to be launching this new service and which we believe to be unique in the UK. Filling shelves with books has, historically, been quite difficult and the limited options available (many of which involve fake books or other pretence) have, understandably, not provided a solution in keeping with the creativity, sophistication and care which goes into interior design. Our supply of bound books (available from our sister website, Prometheus Bound Books) have brought us into contact with many customers looking for shelves of books for interior design or display purposes and our Couture Covers range has been very popular as a way of meeting that demand. We therefore thought that we should offer a much wider range of covered books at affordable prices to allow for pretty much every scheme – whether it be just to fill shelves or to create a stunning, visual, feature.

On this site you will find numerous styles and colours of covers ranging from contemporary, traditional, vintage and also sets of books which, together, create a picture or image which we hope will enhance your interior. Our books are priced by the half metre to give you the opportunity to mix colours and designs should you wish; experience has shown us that schemes can come alive if, for example, plain covers are interspersed with titled ones or complementary colours are used together to create a blended look.

We are always happy to work with your own designs, logo, brand identity and photographs; we are certain we can bring your own ideas to life if you cannot find what you are looking for within our products and our creative team is here to help you realize your dream.

All of our covers come with hard back books of uniform size but we do understand that you may have spaces of differing sizes and want larger, smaller, fatter or thinner books to fill your spaces. We can always provide a tailored, bespoke solution so do please contact us if our standard products aren’t exactly what you want.

We hope you like what we have done with this new concept and very much look forward to working with you.