Washingtons Secret to the Perfect Zoom Bookshelf? Buy It Wholesale. – POLITICO

Books by the Foots creations have also popped up in a variety of TV shows and movies, many of them politics-adjacent. Madam Secretary, Veep, The Blacklist, House of Cards, as well as the 2017 movie Chappaquiddick, for example, have all outfitted their sets with Books by the Foot curations. Some of the most high-profile projects the team works on, however, arent revealed to them until after the fact: Bowman has had the distinctly surreal experience of watching a movie for the first time and recognizing her work onscreen. (Thats how it works, she said, with pretty much anything Marvel.)

Although TV shows set in Washington underwent a change in tone when Trump was elected (as did much of Washington itself), D.C. residents appetites for well-stocked bookshelves, whether as functional libraries or as vanity props, seems to have survived. Or at least, thats what the demand for Books by the Foots services would indicate: The orders Roberts and his staff handled in the Trump years werent all that different from the orders they fielded in prior administrations.

To Roberts, though, the unchanging demand is a good thing. One of the positives for a business like his, he wrote in an email, is that familiar types of people, who work in similar fields and likely share similar aspirations, are constantly moving in and out of the area: Military, [employees of the] State Department and embassies, political folks are always either settling in or leaving. The imminent changeover to the Biden administration will likely bring precisely the type of new business Books by the Foot has depended on for years.

In 2020, of course, everything changed for Books by the Foot around the same time everything changed for everyone else. For most of the year, the coronavirus pandemic switched up the proportion of Books by the Foots commercial to residential projects: In July, Roberts said residential orders, which had previously accounted for 20 percent of business, now accounted for 40 percent. That was partly due to the closures of offices and hotels, Roberts notedbut a few other things were afoot, too.

For one, more people were ordering books with the apparent intent to read them. Were seeing an uptick in books by subject, which are usually for personal use, Roberts said over the summer. Because many people suddenly had extra time at home but hardly anyone was able to shop in brick-and-mortar stores, orders for, say, 10 feet of mysteries, or 3 feet of art books, rose in popularity.

Read the original post:
Washingtons Secret to the Perfect Zoom Bookshelf? Buy It Wholesale. - POLITICO