Thatcher Wine has made a small fortune marketing books as objects that can be collected and displayed in order to tell a story about you. And as the publishing world struggles, he has tapped into a new frontier of growth: books you don’t actually read
Photo: Marvin Orellana/New York Magazine ; Luoman/Getty Images The CEO and founder of the specialty bookseller Juniper Books is surrounded by faux-academic felt pennants that read “BOOK NERD,” “BE HUMBLE,” and “DO HARD THINGS” when I meet him at New York Now, the home-and-gift trade show held at the Javits Center.
Wine was born to entrepreneurs; his parents, Barry and Susan Wine, owned the 1980s midtown restaurant the Quilted Giraffe, known for its gold-leaf-garnished caviar crêpes called “beggar’s purses.” He entered the book world after his tech start-up, Feedback Direct, failed in 2001. Inspired by a third-generation-bookseller friend who bought and sold used books online, Wine attended estate sales and bookstore liquidations to buy books , which he then sold on eBay and AbeBooks.
In 2010, Wine started making custom book jackets, and six years later he was granted U.S. Patent No. 9,349,308 for “dynamic application of a design across multiple product packages” — in other words, for printing one photograph or painting across multiple spines so they compose a single image on the shelf, like a photo of a skier going off a snowy ledge.
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