In the sparse, expensive condo, the books were arranged according to color. In the pink zone, there were old sociology textbooks next to “Confessions of a Shopaholic”; in black, it was the dog whisperer Cesar Millan next to Conrad Black’s biography of F.D.R. I imagined the couple, dressed in matching peg-legged trousers and skinny Merino whatnot, taking the day to shelve their books: Isaac Asimov rubs dust covers with a Kevyn Aucoin makeup manual; Naomi Wolf with Fodor’s Panama. Once done, the couple have a glass of wine to celebrate their installation; their installation to installation.

“Do you know, honey, what books I really want to get into now?” one says to the other. “Purple.”

Of course, those who have long lived in the more traditional world of book collecting will tell you that none of this sounds new. The freshly mansed, semiliterate rock star who walks into one of London’s Charing Cross booksellers and asks for anything at any price, so long as it is bound in green Morocco leather, is an archetype much older than “This Is Spinal Tap.”

The difference now is that anybody can do this, on the cheap, and they don’t need to go to Charing Cross Road. A new kind of bookcase-filling industry has arisen. Today you can buy books for a penny on eBay or books by the pound from stores like Chicago’s Market Fresh, which advertises its retail model as “deli style.” New York’s Strand’s bright yellow-and-red bags once signified a reader serious enough to browse 18 miles of books. The Strand now leads a fast-expanding marketplace of books sold by the yard, and orderable by color, subject or even spine size. On the online craft site Etsy, hundreds of retailers offer so-called instant libraries, usually small lots of books that look nice together, all “ocean hues” or “custard to cream colored.” And if you are not quite sure what to do with the books, some sellers even provide guidelines. Here are some uses suggested by a vendor named beachbabyblues: “Wedding Centerpieces; Escort Cards; Party Favors; Table Setting; Vintage Book Collection; Photo Prop; Home Décor; Home Staging; Baby’s Room; Seasonal Décor; House Warming Gift; Gift for Any Occasion; Bridal Shower; Baby Shower; Thanksgiving; Rustic Christmas; Bridal Shower; Book Party; Party Favors.”

Notice any astonishing omission? By way of decorating a baby shower with the second edition of “Staff Patient Communication” because it is the right shade of pink, we here enter the realm of the truly objectified book, a world that has everything to do with extraordinary abundance and zero to do with content.

A couple of years ago, online book lovers freaked out when the reality-TV-star-turned-crafts-blogger Lauren Conrad posted a video in which she cut up a stack of Lemony Snicket titles in order to make a “unique storage space” (that is, a box) decorated with their spines. The response was so negative — Buzzfeed, not always the staunchest defender of the written word, called it “the worst craft idea ever” — that Conrad quickly deleted the video.

It might be worth rethinking this outrage. The number of books in the world today is literally uncountable, though millions have been digitized. What’s certain is that there’s a tumbling overflow, the sort that can mean only that some of the physical surplus needs to be repurposed. Lauren Conrad was actually working within a growing crafts cadre of making things out of books. Visit any hipster crafts fair, and just as surely as you will find someone making fruit bowls out of melted LPs, you will see items like etchings printed over pages sliced out of literature anthologies, or baby mobiles made from book-page origami, or, God help us, coffee tables made out of coffee-table books.

And there has been a small crop of more muscular visual artists working with books: England’s Jonathan Callan sculpts room-filling geological-looking structures from bound volumes; the Slovakian artist Matej Kren erects massive walls and forts using books as bricks, reincarnating, in a way, the medium back to something like its original, wordless state: wood.