Bookshelves!
I recently became aware of the subreddit called /bookshelvesdetective . Ostensibly, the idea is to post a full photo of a bookshelf (either your own or an acquaintance) and then ask the community to ferret out the persona behind them from the aggregated titles and decorative bric-a-brac. It's entertaining as a reader on several levels: mildly voyeuristic, intellectual dong-measuring-contest, genuine curiosity. It's also quite obvious that many of the posters are showing off. Or trying to, anyway. But isn't that what most people who have bookshelves displayed use them for? Maybe "showing off" isn't quite the right phrase and instead more precisely it should be trying to signal their interests, tastes and so on. Think of a the salesperson's office festooned with books on "winning" by ex-pro athletes, shitty volumes written by assholes like Jack Welch and so on. Heck, remember the COVID days of public intellectuals appearing on Zoom? We got to look...