Important news: we have been gifted a new curator by mind-body-spirit magnate Gwyneth Paltrow. Of course, even that is too limiting an epithet. Gwyneth is, if you will, a curator of curators, lovingly assembling a rolling collection of some of the most preposterous people in late-stage capitalism, and repackaging them for consumption via her Goop website at an undisclosed mark-up.

The latest curator to be raised up by association with madam is one Thatcher Wine, who has assisted Paltrow with the augmentation of her Los Angeles bookshelves, and is described as a “celebrity bibliophile” in an interview with Town and Country magazine.

And so to “Thatcher Wine”. Hand on heart, if you’d just told me his name, I’d have assumed that Thatcher Wine was one of the newly announced candidates for the Brexit party, who in the past week alone have included Marc Bozza, Les Durance and Haydn Brameld. Thatcher Wine could easily take his place alongside those soldiers of fortune advocating for a no-deal exit from the EU, just as any of them could in turn be a credibly named celebrity bibliophile. “My shelves were curated by Hadyn Brameld.” “This library is a Les Durance original.” (Les to be pronounced like the Les in Les Misérables, obviously.)

Anyway, back to Thatcher’s interview with Town and Country magazine. I don’t know how familiar you are with this US publication. The few copies of it I have seen in my life have always been hugely entertaining, packed cover to cover with gracious Americans talking about the style and class of their period homes, some of which date as far back as 1986.

In terms of the Thatcher interview, to give you an immediate flavour of the delights contained therein, I will simply reprint the intro. “After everyone tired of reading on their Kindles,” this begins, axiomatically, “there was a delightful, if unexpected, realisation. Book lovers remembered that books aren’t just for reading, they can also be beautiful objects in and of themselves.”

Thatcher was at the forefront of this great remembering, you sense, and he has a business that sources books “based on interest, author and even colour”. Ah yes. This business of arranging books by colour of the spine, which – while obviously ghastly – enrages a certain type of person more performatively than burning rainforests or children being raised in shipping containers and so on. We shan’t lavish much of our time on it today.

Mainly because Thatcher has gone one better than this, offering clients the chance to buy a load of books, then have special dust jackets made for each in one shade, or as part of a wider image that coheres when they are all on the shelves together. Again, ghastly – but over to Thatcher. “My invention for the book jacket means that someone can have the complete works of Jane Austen, but in a certain Pantone chip colour that matches the rest of the room or with a custom image … Why settle for books that a publisher designed?”

In Pride and Prejudice, one of Miss Bingley’s ruses for impressing Mr Darcy is to declare: “When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library!” If only she’d thought to expand this to “an excellent library of books jacketed in Pantone 2461 C”, the story might have ended entirely differently.

In truth, none of this literary interiors business feels a million miles from those fake antique book spines that can be bought by the yard, which for decades were widely accepted to be a sign of both pretension and philistinism. It seems times have changed. Of the shelves in Gwyneth’s own LA dining room, which he curated, Thatcher says he stuck “to a more rigid colour palette of black, white and grey, since it was less of a space where one might hang out and read”. Or even eat.

The occasion of this interview is that Thatcher has his first book out, entitled For the Love of Books, which its publicity blurb assures me is itself “a keepsake worthy of any bibliophile’s collection”. This keepsake-about-keepsakes precis somehow reminds me of an E Nesbit story collection I loved as a child, which had a story called The Town in the Library. It involved two children building a town out of books in their library, then stepping into it and finding that this town contained their own house, which duly contained their library, in which there was a town built of books. Into that town they then went, and so on, through all the towns in all the libraries. I can’t remember how it ended. (I’d like to find it and check, but unfortunately my husband’s system for categorising our books is so aggressively opaque that it effectively amounts to enemy code, and should by rights be a matter for Bletchley Park.)

Thatcher, meanwhile, has some amusing theories about where we are going, textually. “Publishers like Taschen, Phaidon and Rizzoli are making these gorgeous oversize books on art, design and architecture,” he says. “I think people are collecting those as an alternative to looking at screens.” Maybe. For me, the apogee of this type of book was United, a 2006 coffee table book about Manchester United, which cost £3,000 and weighed 30kg (four and a half stone) – more than most coffee tables. Review copies were not available, so those who wished to cast a critical eye over the work were required to visit it at its publishers, where a chap in white gloves turned the 850 pages for them.

As for Thatcher’s theories about books that don’t relate to their physical size or cover shade, he vaguely recommends classics such as Hemingway and Austen. Also, apparently, “the Stoic philosophers are having a moment now”. Huzzah for the Stoics, who look set to sell like hot cakes through the wellness section of Goop for about 10 minutes, before falling out of favour to rival products such as the perfect cross-body bag, or the latest bit of quartz to pop up your fanny. Hey – as Seneca himself put it: enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.

Elton John and the problem with privacy

With requisite ceremony, proper celebrity Elton John has swept into the row about Prince Harry and Meghan’s frequent uses of private jets this summer, in the manner of someone who believes he can only be helpful.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The man likes flowers, OK? Elton John at his 60th birthday concert in New York, 2007. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

As discussed in this column last week, these are the royal private jet flights critics seem most preoccupied with, as opposed to the private jet flights featuring Prince Andrew, currently lying low to avoid mounting questions about his longtime friendship with the recently deceased millionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, owner of a US Virgin Islands property known locally as “Paedophile Island”.

Sorry, where were we? Oh yes – Meghan! Something about a long weekend away with her husband and baby? Quite the scandal. Following the welter of allegations of hypocrisy, relating to the couple’s eco campaigning, Elton this week took to Twitter to state hotly that it was he who paid for the private jet they used to reach his Nice home, in order to give them some much-needed rest from a few shifts down the royal appearances coalmine (my words, not Elton’s).

Furthermore, Elton asserted: “Prince Harry’s mother, Diana Princess of Wales, was one of my dearest friends. I feel a profound sense of obligation to protect Harry and his family from the unnecessary press intrusion that contributed to Diana’s untimely death.” Well, quite. That said, in the year she died, Elton and Gianni Versace published a joint coffee-table book entitled Rock and Royalty, which featured private pictures, including one of Diana and William and Harry. She promptly froze him out for it, although the pair reconciled later that year in the wake of Versace’s death.

But back to the present day, where his intervention can only be of assistance to Meghan and Harry. Let’s face it, Elton defending you against charges of excess is a huge mood, and I already tend to defend my own less justifiable purchases in the precise tone of voice he used to a court trying his former business manager, when asked about a £293,000 florist bill. As he put it: “I like flowers.”

Let’s hope that “I like private jets” will prove an effective line of defence for Meghan and Harry. Andrew, perhaps, will need something more artful.