In our house we have a fair amount of books. There’s a shelf in the hallway, one that covers a wall in the kitchen-dining room and a few sets of shelves in my office. It’s fair to say that we’ve run out of room for any more, which is reflected in our habits. I have a Kindle, and Herself does audiobooks.
It’s also fair to say that our books don’t have a function; or not the function they were primarily produced for. They’ve been read, and realistically, few of them will be reread.
The books in our house are mostly a form of decoration: which, even as I typed that line, gave me a small pang of conscience; like I’m letting the books down by writing that, that books deserve better treatment than to be trivialised in this way.
There is a cohort of people who, by dint of their socio-economic standing, their education, their generation and various other factors, will always have a lot of books in their homes: books they may have read once, but unless they discover some revolutionary method of extending their lifespan, will almost certainly never read again. Their books have – whether they admit it or not – become a form of decoration, and like all home decoration, it projects information about the book-owners. They enjoy reading, they value words and ideas. I like to think of myself as one of those people. I also like the physicality of books. There’s something comforting about a room full of them.
A few years back, I had a bit too much time on my hands and I took a notion, based on a picture I saw. I rearranged the books on the shelves in the kitchen-diningroom based on colour. Groups of white and black and red and orange. I also arranged them, left to right, from the tallest down to the shortest.
Sometimes, people who love books can be a wee bit po-faced about them: resisting fun at all costs
It was during the pandemic: so, you know.
Even while I was doing it I felt weird about doing it. Yet when I had finished, I thought it looked pretty good.
Herself, however, didn’t have this reaction.
In fact, she reacted in the worst possible way – by not expressing an opinion. Instead, she asked a series of questions: in the tone of voice you’d use with a stranger you’ve just found naked and crying in your front garden. Did I think it looked good? Why did I do this? What was wrong with the way the books were before?
She didn’t insist that I change it back, and then took to having her office Zoom meetings with the books in the background: during which she would regularly point out what I had done as a way of canvassing opinion. Some were neutral. Some felt that it was evidence of my inevitable mental collapse. Some thought it was cool.
I’m far from the only person to have ever done this. It was, for a while, a “design trend”, but one that also prompted a significant backlash: doing this somehow demeaned the books, reduced them to physical objects rather than repositories of knowledge. To organise them alphabetically, or by author or philosophical school was perfectly acceptable, but by colour was unacceptably trivial, a case of style over substance. It implied – gasp – that the owner of the books hadn’t read them at all.
Three years later and our books are still arranged that way, and I wouldn’t change it back: the colour organisation throws up all sorts of interesting combinations. Marian Keyes is sandwiched between My Life and Loves by Frank Harris on one side and Naomi Wolf’s biography of the vagina on the other.
Sometimes, people who love books can be a wee bit po-faced about them: resisting fun at all costs. Which is a shame as, among the many reasons people read, fun is one of them. Any book on the subject would tell you that.