ZEN IN THE ART OF BEING A SELF-IMPORTANT POSEUR

The business section of today's New York Times has an article about the personal libraries of CEOs and other masters of the universe. The message is: Surprise! These guys read poetry and stuff! They don't read business books!

But even though we're told that our economic betters are Really Deep Thinkers, we also discover a bit of the puffed-up arrogance we'd expect from these guys:

Few Nike colleagues ... ever saw the personal library of the founder, Phil Knight, a room behind his formal office. To enter, one had to remove one's shoes and bow: the ceilings were low, the space intimate, the degree of reverence demanded for these volumes on Asian history, art and poetry greater than any the self-effacing Mr. Knight, who is no longer chief executive, demanded for himself.

The Knight collection remains in the Nike headquarters. "Of course the library still exists," Mr. Knight said in an interview. "I'm always learning."

Got that? This collection of books on Asia is in an American corporate office, but you have to take your shoes off to enter it. Er, isn't that a bit like being asked not to cough while you're in the classical-music section of a CD store?

Oh, and does it strike you as creepy that Knight amassed a large collection of books on Asia while exploiting Asian workers in sweatshops?

Which brings me to another curious detail from the article:

Students of power should take note that C.E.O.'s are starting to collect books on climate change and global warming, not Al Gore's tomes but books from the 15th century about the weather, Egyptian droughts, even replicas of Sumerian tablets recording extraordinary changes in climate, according to John Windle, the owner of John Windle Antiquarian Booksellers in San Francisco.

It's as if they're thinking to themselves: Yeah, I have five houses, and I take a gas-guzzling private jet when I go from one to the other, or zip over to Davos, but global warming isn't my fault! There's always been global warming!

Oh, and there's this, also from John Windle:

"...I have a customer who collects diaries of people of no importance at all. The entries say, 'It was 63 degrees and raining this morning.'..."

What do you think that collector is thinking? I'll venture a guess: It's OK that my workers lead tedious lives of quiet desperation -- all kinds of people have led such lives, throughout history!

One CEO, by the way, took two years to read an E.L. Doctorow novel. Two years?