The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Saturday
Shelves full of musty pages? Take a leaf out of my book
The soundtrack to my last term of school back in the olden days wasn’t Madonna, Prince and Tears for Fears, though they certainly featured, but the slap-slap of the librarian bashing together books in the school library as I attempted slapslapdash last-minute revision.
What Dr Johnson called “buffeting” – briskly bashing one book against another – is an effective way of ridding books of one of their mortal enemies: dust. Technically speaking, the other two enemies are heat and damp, but I think their biggest enemy is neglect, which can leave them susceptible to the other three. So use your books, read them, love them, and the four horsemen of the bookpocalypse should be more easily contained.
HOW TO ARRANGE THEM
➤ I used to be very sniffy about the trend for arranging books by the colours of their spines, but if the past year has taught me anything, it’s that people should do whatever makes them happy, even if it makes me grind my teeth. I admit it looks pretty, and who cares if it takes you three hours to find a treasured tome?
A few years ago, I had a small windfall and I spent it on the most extravagant present I’ve ever bought myself: floor-to-ceiling bookcases in my study, complete with rails and a library ladder. I have loved its navy-blue beauty ever since and it’s saved me hundreds of hours in hunting down precious titles. It mostly houses my cookbooks and gardening books – more than 2,000 at last count – and when it came to The Grand Reshelving, I asked a librarian friend how I should begin to organise them, could I hire an assistant to steer me through the mysteries of the Dewey Decimal system? She gave me great advice. “How do you use them? Arrange them like that.” So now they are arranged in sections: A-Z by author for general books, A-Z by subject for specialist books, and A-Z by country for specific cuisines and gardens. Sometimes there is overlap. For example, does Nigella Lawson’s Nigellissima go under L for Lawson or I for Italian? This is where it comes down to how I think about them. It’s rather comforting to have a shelf of Nigellas behind me as I type, so they all go together in one block.
So consider how you think about your books. Arrange them like that for easy retrieval.
CLEAN PAGES
➤ Ideally, books should be kept at a constant temperature, in dry conditions and out of direct sunlight. Cramming “excess” books into cellars or lofts is possibly the worst thing you can do for them, and invariably a sign you could do with a clear-out. There’s a difference between a collection and a hoard. A stack of beautiful art books is one thing; dozens of paperbacks from holiday airports long forgotten is another. Weed out those you’re unlikely to read again to make room for the ones you love.
Every week or so, run a feather duster or a microfibre duster along the top of the bookcases to remove surface dust. When you think of it, do a little “buffeting” à la Dr Johnson.
It’s too much for many of us to think of cleaning our bookcases all in one go. I do mine in a rolling programme, perhaps one shelf a week, where I take the books out, dust the shelf thoroughly, and rub a microfibre cloth all over the books’ covers before putting them back.
HANDLE WITH CARE
➤ Never crack books open violently, or lay open books face down, in case you break the spine. (Though I confess, I once had a boyfriend who was so fanatical about not creasing the spines of books, after we broke up I deliberately broke the spines of the next 10 paperbacks I read. It was the most rebellious thing I had ever done.)
➤ Use bookmarks and don’t turn down the corners of pages. Dog-earing a book is the mark of the beast.
➤ Don’t hook your fingers over the top of the spine to pull a book from the shelves. Push its two neighbouring books in a little and pull it out with your fingers firmly pressed on the book’s sides.
➤ Don’t cram books so tightly on to the shelves that they are difficult to get out.
➤ Never scrawl notes or underline things in a book you have borrowed. But you already knew that.
MUSTY SMELLS
➤ Sometimes, precious books, or second-hand books, have a musty smell. Take a plastic box with an airtight lid large enough to hold the book, scatter some bicarbonate of soda on the bottom of it and place some tissue paper over the bicarb. Put the book on top, seal up the box and leave it for a week or so, by which time the bicarbonate of soda should have absorbed the smell.
YOU’RE NOT A LIBRARY
➤ If you love a book, it is very tempting to press it into the hands of friends, which you must do, so long as you never expect to get it back. Lending books to those you care about is a little like lending money: only to be done if you never expect it to be returned. No one has room in their lives for festering resentment over a paperback.