The internet wants to know why Stephen Breyer’s interview backdrop is so weird
Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in an interview about his new book, Reading the Constitution, with The Washington Post. Courtesy of The Washington Post
By Beth Harpaz March 28, 2024
Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s new book, Reading the Constitution, is a defense of his approach to interpreting America’s founding document. His publisher, Simon & Schuster, calls it “a provocative, brilliant analysis.” The New York Times review calls it “well meaning, tedious and exasperating.”
But never mind what the book’s actually about. Here’s what inquiring minds really want to know: Why is his bookshelf interview backdrop so weird?
Comments about a video interview Breyer recorded with The Washington Post went viral this week after viewers noticed that all the books on the shelves behind the justice were turned backward. Well, not all of the books. The cover of his own faced proudly forward.
Breyer and his assistant at Harvard, where he now teaches, did not respond to requests for comment from the Forward. Nor did the question surface during The Washington Post’s interview. In the meantime, social media users quickly posited some intriguing theories.
On X (formerly Twitter), the popular account Room Rater, which rates video interview backgrounds, disparaged the look and blamed the publisher. “Our Investigative Unit believes this travesty is @simonschuster’s doing as we’ve seen this ridiculous setup previously with another author,” the post said. “It’s 0/10 for #StephenBreyer for sitting in front of it.”
Our Investigative Unit believes this travesty is @simonschuster’s doing as we’ve seen this ridiculous setup previously with another author. It’s 0/10 for #StephenBreyer for sitting in front of it. pic.twitter.com/3i6RAKarSK
(By contrast, the Forward’s Jacob Kornbluh received a 10/10 rating from @RoomRater for his backdrop of Judaica, flowers and Hebrew texts.)
An X post about the controversy by Washington Post opinion columnist Catherine Rampell garnered 1.5 million views and more than 700 responses, with users suggesting increasingly outlandish explanations for the decor choice.
One person responding to Rampell commented, “I believe he wants to avoid anyone inferring political bias from his reading choices.”
And what might those reading choices be? “They’re all romance novels,” responded someone else.
It’s a shame to take all the fun out of this, but eventually the publisher did provide the Forward an explanation about Breyer’s backdrop: “This is a set decoration choice in the Simon & Schuster in-house studio.”
A design trend
Shelving books backward is also a design trend that started pre-pandemic, ostensibly to keep colorful covers from clashing with home decor. “Books don’t match your decor? Don’t fret,” declared a 2017 post on Instagram from Apartment Theory. “The incredibly easy solution? Flip them for a perfectly coordinated look.”
Of course if all your books faced backward, you’d never be able to find any particular title you might be looking for — in which case there’s not much point in actually owning books.
In 2022, HGTV host Jasmine Roth suggested a more prosaic explanation for the decor trend, saying that shows on the channel often arrange books with the spines hidden to avoid getting “copyright clearance from every single title in order to display them.”
During the pandemic, as the rise of X’s RoomRater attests, bookshelf backgrounds suddenly became a source of scrutiny, with featured titles serving as a referendum on their owner’s academic and political bona fides. Certain books, like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, became almost passé as interviewees by the score used them to establish themselves as public-minded intellectuals. Perhaps riffing on this particular lockdown trend, one spectator asked if Breyer was embarrassed that he didn’t own a copy of Caro’s biography of Robert Moses.
We can’t say whether Breyer owns a copy of that particular doorstopper. But is this Jewish former justice a public-minded intellectual? Of that we can be reasonably sure.
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