Books in Bulk.(The Talk of the Town)

Between digging for artifacts and dangling from cliffs, Indiana Jones must have very little time to read, never mind to buy books. Luckily, he has a team of people to do it for him. Dr. Jones--as represented by the set decorators for the forthcoming film "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"--recently engaged the Strand Bookstore's Books-by-the-Foot service, which provides ready-made libraries for private homes, stores, and movie sets.

Although prop books are meant to be seen and not read, they have to evoke a mise en scene, inside and out. For Indiana Jones, the filmmakers specified that the books cover such topics as paleontology, marine biology, and pre-Columbian society. They had to be in muted colors and predate 1957. "People have gotten so character-specific nowadays," Jenny McKibben, a manager at the store, said. "It can't just be color anymore. With high-def, they can just freeze the film and say, 'Oh, that's so inappropriate.' "

Since the program's inception, in 1986, the Strand has built scores of imaginary reading rooms, from the prison library in "Oz" to the Barnes & Noble clone in "You've Got Mail." Clients also include window dressers, commercial architects (the Strand furnished each floor in the Library Hotel with a different Dewey decimal category), and people with more shelf space than leisure time. Kelsey Grammer requested all hardback fiction in two of his homes, while Steven Spielberg, who, incidentally, is the director of the new Indiana Jones movie, allowed a wider range (cookbooks, children's books, volumes on art and film) to penetrate his Hamptons estate. "There have been a lot of biographies on him, so I put those in there, too," Nancy Bass Wyden, a co-owner of the store, said.

Customers can choose from eighteen basic library styles, for purchase or rental. "Bargain books," a random selection of hardbacks, is the cheapest, at ten dollars per foot of shelf space. For thirty dollars, clients can customize the color. For seventy-five, they can get a "leather-looking" library, which, as the Strand's Web site puts it, "is often mistaken for leather."

Despite this emphasis on form over content, McKibben approaches her job more like a librarian than like a decorator. "It's really just knowing books and knowing what people read," she said, as she sorted through stacks in her third-floor office. In ...