Name: Fake books.

Age: Not as old as you would immediately think.

Appearance: Like books, but – get this – fake.

Is this about ghostwriters? No, it’s worse. Have you ever visited someone’s house and seen acres and acres of books spread across their beautiful floor-to-ceiling bookcase?

Yes. And have you ever reached up to pull out an interesting looking tome, only to find that it is actually just a faux-aged spine printed on an empty cardboard box, placed there because the owner wants to look better-read than they are?

No, because that would be genuinely psychopathic. It happens more than you would imagine. According to a recent New York Times article, the rise of fake books as a lifestyle accessory seems unstoppable.

But why? Oh, for a variety of reasons. Perhaps someone takes a lot of Zoom calls and wants to show people that they are intelligent and literate, when in fact they spend the bulk of their free time watching TikToks on the toilet.

The frauds! Perhaps they want to hide their possessions behind a facade of fake spines. Or perhaps they have so much free space that they have to fill it with fake books to stop it from looking silly.

How are they even getting these fake books? Oh, they’re around. But if you want real books, a company called Books by the Foot will sell you a box of random titles designed to fill a specified amount of shelf. You can pick your books by subject, by colour, or by your preferred level of distress (fairly or highly). They can even wrap all the books in plain paper for you, if you really want your whole house to look freakishly impersonal.

And are any of these books particularly well written? Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Sure. Let’s all just sit around and read the books we buy.

This is an outrage. Oh please, books have been heading this way for ages. People either buy them because they want to arrange them by colour in their over-styled homes, or they fetishise book ownership by buying more than they could possibly need and then bragging about their to-be-read lists on social media.

So if people are treating books as a simple commodity, what are they reading? Reading? In this day and age? When there’s TV and video games and Instagram? Who has the time?

Do say: “People are buying fake books to use as decor.”

Don’t say: “I find that a fake Kindle saves more space.”