The printed book has been given a stay of execution by an unlikely source: the design community. Jeffrey Colle, a builder of vast estates that mimic turn-of-the-century designs, wouldn’t think of omitting a library from his creations. A 1,562-square-meter house on 17 hectares in Water Mill, New York, comes with a $29.995-million price tag and a library Mr. Colle had built from French chalked quarter- sawn oak. There is room for more than 1,000 books.

Mr. Colle has collaborated with Bennett Weinstock, a Philadelphia decorator known for his English interiors, on some of his libraries. Mr. Weinstock still shops in London to find just the right leatherbound look, he said. “Some people will insist that they be in English, because they want them to look as if they could read the books,” Mr. Weinstock said. “Others don’t care what language the books are in as long as the bindings are beautiful.”

Even a modernist builder like Steve Hermann in Los Angeles, who makes multimillion-dollar houses for buyers like Christina Aguilera, includes hectares of shelves in his houses. Mr. Hermann designed a glassy Neutralike house with a 18-by-4-meter shelving system, which has room for 4,000 books, he said.

“But who has 4,000 books?” he said. He ordered 2,000 white-wrapped books from Thatcher Wine, who creates custom book collections in his Boulder, Colorado, warehouse.

Mr. Wine charges from $80 to $350 per 30 centimeters. The rare vellum is more pricey, at about $750 per 30 centimeters; a library he did for a private equity manager cost about $80,000, he said.

“I could have hung art,” Mr. Hermann said. “But I like the textural feeling of shelves .”

Federico Uribe, a Colombian conceptual artist working in Miami, has ordered thousands of books in primary colors to make sculptures of palm trees and boa constrictors. (“Most people destroy trees to make books,” Mr. Uribe said. “I destroy books to make trees. I like that the books are telling a story in a different language.”)

Some designers are tweaking books their clients already own. Peter Pennoyer, a New York architect, is designing wooden boxes that look like perfectly bound books to contain a client’s unruly collection of classics.

“A book is a meaningful, sensory experience,” he said.

Other designers say their clients are asking for more personalized content: color-coordinated regional histories, for example, or westernthemed titles.

Alexa Hampton, a New York decorator, said, “The people I work for don’t want books just as backdrop or theater, which they did 20 years ago. Now they want books they actually might read.”

Ms. Hampton and a client recently spent a morning at the Strand Bookstore in New York, a vast emporium of used and rare volumes . “When people are reading less,” Ms. Hampton said, “you think more people would say ‘Just fill it with books and make it pretty.’ Instead, they are very involved.”

Jenny McKibben, who runs the book-by-the-foot business at the Strand, takes mostly phone and Internet orders.

Designers at the Rockwell Group asked for “Sin City themes,” she said, for more than 1,000 books to spread about the 10,200-square-meter casino and 2,995 rooms of the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, the new casino resort there.

At the Maryland-based Wonder Book, Chuck Roberts, its amiable owner, said he gets requests from developers, set designers, decorators, even wedding planners. “We’ve had a great year - it’s broken all records,” Mr. Roberts said.

The-book-as-relic was forecast by marketers. “Objectifying objects,” Ann Mack at JWT New York, the marketing and advertising agency, wrote in her trend report for the coming year, “would be a trend to watch.”

Ms. Mack added that she was working to “refresh” her own apartment. She wondered if she might stack her books and turn them into legs for a coffee table.

“Then,” she said, “I can put my Kindle on top.”


By PENELOPE GREEN