Personal Libraries
In looking (lovingly) at the mountains of books in our house, it occurs to me that one’s bookshelves are, in effect, a kind of personal memoir—at least, a memoir of intellectual development. It’s a pity that the books are not arranged more effectively.
For example, the small revolving case, on the left, and the loosely-piled books behind the old lithograph of an Alewife Shad, are just recent acquisitions. I tend to shelve literary books, alphabetically, once they’re read. Other books (food & cooking, history, science, local interest, angling, books-about-books, et cetera) find their way to other bookshelves, in other parts of the house.
If this thought had occurred to me—say, seventy years ago—the books could have been shelved chronologically, by dates read. That would have made their function, as a representation of who I am, much more useful.
Still, the contents of the shelves are us.
[by “us” I mean my wife and me, because many of our books are mixed together. I suspect that an astute reader might even be able to tell, by looking at the mixture, why we’ve been married so long.]
Perhaps that’s why even the threat of giving up our books is so… threatening. When we jettison a book, we toss a part of ourselves overboard.
Think of it: when (assuming you are a reader—because why else would you be reading this?) you visit the home of new acquaintance, don’t you scan the bookshelves to get a better idea of who they are? During Covid times, when people shared videos of themselves—often posed before bookshelves—didn’t you try to make out the titles of books behind the talking head? Even more carefully than paying attention to their words?
Of course you did. A person’s reading habits are indicative of what they believe, and also tells us how they came to believe it. The books we choose to show are who we are (or—for the devious—how we want to be seen). Real readers seek to know, to better understand, what they encounter through printed words—because that understanding translates into a better understanding of the ultimate mystery: existence itself.
What troubles me, now that I think upon it, is that—when someone new walked in the door, and saw all the bookshelves—instead of examining the books with care, they merely asked, “Why all the books?”
It felt incredibly rude.
Here they’d been handed a virtual memoir—in condensed form for easy scanning—and they chose to ignore it. My questions, then, become very personal, “Why were they even here, and why didn’t they want to know who we are?”
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