An Annotated Bookshelf
Fourteen shelves, two readers, no system. A tour of what we own, how it got here, and why almost none of it is organised alphabetically.
People who visit us often stand in front of the bookshelf for a while, trying to work out the system. There isn't one — not a consistent one. There is history, which is different.
The shelves are organised by accumulation. Books end up where they ended up, more or less, with occasional interventions when things get unmanageable. Mara will sometimes reorganise a section by colour, which I find aesthetically pleasing and practically useless in equal measure. I have tried alphabetical twice. It lasted about three weeks each time.
What follows is a partial tour.
The Top Shelf
Technically inaccessible without the small stepladder that lives behind the kitchen door. Contains: books we have finished and are keeping but are not currently in conversation with; two boxes of photographs that have not been sorted since we moved in; a plant that arrived small and has since become something of a structural concern; and one book that Mara put up there to stop me rereading it before I had processed it properly. I have not retrieved it. She was probably right.
The Travel Section
Not a shelf. More of a tendency — travel books accumulate in a loose band across the middle shelves because that is where we reach for them when planning, and they migrate back to roughly the same place when we're done. There are doubles of several books, acquired independently before we knew each other, which we keep both copies of on principle.
The Floor Stack
Not a shelf but deserves documentation. A column of books on the floor beside Mara's reading chair, currently seventeen high, representing her active reading queue. The top four are in rotation. The ones below are aspirational. I have learned not to ask about the ones below.
The Shelf We Argue About
One shelf, roughly at eye level, contains books that are in active dispute — not contested ownership exactly, but contested placement. Mara believes certain books belong together thematically. I believe they belong where I can find them. These are not always the same place.
We have reached an arrangement where that shelf operates by a kind of negotiated cohabitation. Books appear there, stay for a while, and eventually drift to wherever they actually belong. It works less badly than it sounds.
The Inscription Section
No fixed location, but worth noting. Books with inscriptions — from each other, from friends, from people we no longer see — are kept regardless of whether we liked the book. The inscription is the point. There is a novel on the third shelf that is not very good and has an inscription from Mara on the title page that I would not part with for any reason. She knows this.