(General managers at both hotels said they were unfamiliar with the orders, which Roberts said were placed a number of years ago.) Meanwhile, shows at the Kennedy Center have used Books by the Foot’s curations onstage, and sometimes the company’s handiwork even shows up in the homes of politicians. According to Roberts, The Madison hotel once purchased 19th-century American history texts to use in its decor, and the Washington Hilton ordered books by color a while back (“ Earth Tones,” he recalled) to place in some of its suites. Wonder Book’s designs have been featured in a number of locations in and around D.C. And, over the past two decades, Books by the Foot’s books-as-decor designs have become a fixture in the world of American politics, filling local appetite for books as status symbols, objects with the power to silently confer taste, intellect, sophistication or ideology upon the places they’re displayed or the people who own them. While the company ships nationally, it gets a hefty portion of its business from major cities including Washington. Located in Frederick, Wonder Book’s 3-acre warehouse full of 4 million books is a short jaunt from the nation‘s capital. “Pretty much every book you see on Books by the Foot whose only other option would be oblivion,” Roberts says. A lover of books who professes to never want to see them destroyed, he described the service as a way to make lemonade out of lemons in this case, the lemons are used books, overstock books from publishers or booksellers, and other books that have become either too common or too obscure to be appealing to readers or collectors. Roberts opened the first of Wonder Book’s three locations in 1980, but Books by the Foot began with the dawn of the internet in the late 1990s. They always order under some code name,” Bowman says.
Only sometimes do Bowman and Wonder Book President Chuck Roberts know the real identity of the person whose home or project they’ve outfitted: “When we work with certain designers, I pretty much already know it’s going to be either an A-list movie or an A-list client. The books would then be “staged,” or arranged with the same care a florist might extend to a bouquet of flowers, on a library cart double-checked by a second staffer and then shipped off to the residence or commercial space where they would eventually be shelved and displayed (or shelved and taken down to read). If an order were to come in for, say, 12 feet of books about politics, specifically with a progressive or liberal tilt-as one did in August-Wonder Book’s manager, Jessica Bowman, would simply send one of her more politics-savvy staffers to the enormous box labeled “Politically Incorrect” (the name of Books by the Foot’s politics package) to select about 120 books by authors like Hillary Clinton, Bill Maher, Al Franken and Bob Woodward.
The Wonder Book staff doesn’t pry too much into which objective a particular client is after.
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