In a village in Somerset, England called Westbury-sub-Mendip, you can now enjoy a visit to a former phone box, one of those iconic red phone boxes that fill one with thoughts of quaint villages with names like Westbury-sub-Mendip. Inside it, you'll find a practical, if rather small-scale, solution to the problem faced by book-lovers everywhere: what to do with all those weighty tomes. The phone box is now stuffed with books and functions as a book exchange/lending library.

Even if e-book readers are destined to make inroads into the domain of page-turners everywhere, it is likely that the world will remain quite full of physical books for the foreseeable future, or at least until something does away with all those acid-free copies of Ulysses. As a writer and therefore a reader, I know all too well the dilemma caused by the presence of all those bound pages. How do you integrate them into your home without creating a major case of overwhelm? Absent your own phone box, I mean.

There are, of course, people who are unhampered by such considerations, those who happily use their several books as decoration—probably the same folks who don't get twitchy when they unroll that trompe-l'oeil library backdrop for family portraits. It is easy enough to see the appeal of a tabletop artfully strewn with a few choice volumes—a leather-bound Victorian book of verse or two, an oversized picture book of exotic locales, and maybe an issue of O Magazine with a pull-out section on inspirational sayings.

But unlike the off-camera residents of Crate and Barrel catalogues whose shelves are arid plains upon which three-volume sets swoon like odalisques against a single stone apple, most people I know have enough books to sink the QE2. They are mute partners, important if weighty, crowding around wherever they're given a chance to multiply. They peek from underneath couches, collect in dark corners. Still, they can't be done without, so how do you corral them all and manage to have an interior that doesn't resemble an unruly fiction section?

If you look around your house and see Pisa-like constructions of poetic volumes and promontories of discarded magazines, a trick of perspective might be in order. Each book is, of course, its own relatively important manifestation of literary endeavor. But if you look long enough, something interesting occurs. Just like saying the word "potato" until you hear the sounds rather than the meaning, stare at books long enough and you can see them as a bunch of objects—objects with design potential.

That trick seems to have gone into full effect for certain interior-minded folks. A visit to the Web Urbanist (and similar sites devoted to cool-looking design) can lead to the discovery of a whole world of ideas to help you transform your ocean of books into an element to be harnessed and pressed into aesthetic service of a different kind.

In some examples, bookshelves are themselves made of books, a sort of postmodern coup (which may soon give rise to academic papers like "Textuality and Cannibalism: Text as Shelf"). In others, books are packaged in one way or another—placed in tall, narrow holders, or hung from a bar like clothes—to be used as building blocks you can in turn use to craft your own surroundings.

Some of the most intriguing methods of employing books in an interior come down to placing them in unusual locales. What at first looks like shelving, for instance, is at second glance a staircase. It's possible to procure shelving to place between your rafters, or even to pull off a favorite of Scooby Doo fans everywhere: the bookshelf for the space-challenged which doubles as a secret door.

One particularly elegant solution to the overflowing book problem is simple color-coding. Granted, your efforts might be hampered if you've skimped on the bright pink or yellow books, but a rainbow of books produces a much livelier wall than does an alphabetized or random lineup, and at first glance doesn't look so much like a wall full of books.

Books also can make great furniture. At the European chain Nobody and Co., you can find the excellent "bibliochaise," a sort of chair-shelf that is at once compact, aesthetically pleasing and useful—it holds five meters' worth of books, which surround a mod cushioned chair. (Similar designs can be found on this side of the Atlantic, of course.)

If you're not into spending lots of money for high-end mod designs, it's easy to find things you can make yourself: designs upending the square bookshelf to create leaning shelves, squiggly plastic shelves, and many variations on the tilting shelf, some of which turn a wall of books into something resembling a wine cellar. A particular standout in the DIY department can be found at the website Instructables, where you can peruse plenty of information on how to build perfectly functional and surprisingly cool cardboard shelves—one example is a gigantic yin and yang. It's easy on the pocketbook and the environment.

Escaping the dusty library concept is powerful. Your books can become an interesting part of your interior-scape instead of a weighty presence. And if your mother-in-law turns a critical eye toward your wealth of literature, just think—next time, she'll be awed by your super-hip style, and may not even notice that your house could double as an extension of the Bodleian. That ought to be worth a few hours of crafting in cardboard.