Part of your issue with getting the gold letters to shine well is probably also that the diffuse is so bright. Gold generally has an extremely dark diffuse and a bright spec. Its the contrast between the two that sells the material definition more than either or.
materials feel poorly defined, normals are too soft, speculat too strong in areas of totally black diffuse colour, and it doesn't feel grand enough, seems like an amatuer wizards desk, where's the crazy fluids and the mizing pots and glass tubes, and the stuffed animals and the globe showing the fantasy world he inhabits…
Nothing magic with the books... The normal map is a mix of bake from a high poly sculped in zbrush and some normals from images that I obtained using some base textures - leather, rusty metal, etc, plus some drawed by hand for the signs on the cover. I used occlusion cavity, normal, and height maps to help me compose the…