How do you stack up in the battle of the bookshelves?
By confining everyone indoors, the Government has unwittingly opened up a divisive new skirmish in the culture war. No, not the opposed forces of lockdown fanatics vs sceptics, or even the great mask debate. I speak of bookshelves.
We know more about other people’s reading habits than ever before
– or at least the ones they aspire to – thanks to the Covid-imposed TV interviews with pundits and politicians conducted from their homes, usually with a backdrop of impressively-stocked bookshelves. (A Twitter account called “Bookcase Credibility” compiles screenshots of them, passing hilarious and often merciless judgments).
How do you arrange your books? My Dad, a forensic organiser with a hint of OCD in his taste for symmetry and order, sorts his alphabetically. This makes books easy to find and democratic in their proximity: EL James can sit alongside Henry, Flaubert and Dick Francis nestle together at last.
Prior to lockdown, I had assumed everyone sorted theirs thus, or by genre, time period or in steepling piles beside the bed, but I’ve been astounded by the sheer numbers colourcoding, sorting by size, and other forms of lunacy. Like the buyers of unsalted butter or orange juice without the bits in, they are incomprehensible; a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
In this decluttered age, we should perhaps be grateful the books haven’t been Marie Kondo’d into oblivion (Kondo, a tidying expert, recommends owning no more than 30). Yet there is an anarchy to colour-coding. It is one thing to build a satisfying block of Penguin Classics or Everyman tomes, quite another to shove a travel guide next to a graphic novel and a book on rugby, purely on the basis of colour. And how do they ever find anything? Few remember our book covers, unlike the dim-witted Cyril from
(“I read a book once, green it was.”)
The suspicion is that growing numbers are subscribing to the semiphilistine notion that “books do furnish a room”, rendering their presence purely aesthetic. One friend has first-hand experience of this, having worked for a high-end bookseller, supplying London’s plutocrats with “books by the yard”. Elsewhere, self-conscious trends have emerged for assembling books on heavily “curated” shelves and posting snaps of them on Instagram (#shelfie).
Yet perhaps I have been too hasty in my condemnation. The writer Robert Colvile boasts bookshelves in a symphony of shades, and defends the system, instigated by his late and much-loved wife, an avid reader, against my gibes on the basis that “we know our books so well.” Arranging by colour, he adds, creates a sense of soothing calm – perfect for reading. Colour-coding works for true bibliophiles, it seems – and those with photographic memories.
By far the most jawdropping fetish is placing book spines inwards, like the masochists who prefer to do jigsaws picture-downwards. We genre-sorters should cut the colour-coders some slack. The “spine-inward” brigade remind us who the real enemy is.