Tomes have been written about books and the art of reading. Book collectors and their fetishes have been romanticized, too. But, what about those wooden crates, aluminum cabinets and glass doors, which accommodate the readers' beloved? In times of Kindle and virtual bookshelf-building on Shelfari, there are still those who continue to ogle bookcases and relish the process of filing them up.
From A to Z
For Latha Anantharaman, a book columnist, “I like my literature shelved in alphabetic order, from Douglas Adams to Tennessee Williams. Nothing else is orderly in my house, but my life revolves around books and I like to lay my hands on a book the minute I think about it. I leave a space at the end of each shelf, so that newcomers can take their correct place without my having to shift everything, but many of my favourite authors seem to fall between A and E, so every year or two there is a great migration,” she remarks.
On the other hand, Nivethitha Kumar, a Software Engineer based in California, arranges her books according to height. “My books currently reside in one among the many compartments of my TV stand. I keep the educational books separate from the books I read for pleasure. All of them are arranged in order of height. I have both Tamil and English books. Ideally I would love to organize them by language and genre. I guess I have to wait until I can get a bigger book shelf and lots and lots of books!” she says.
When Suchitra Ramachandran, a student of Carnegie Mellon University visited her adviser's place for a Christmas party, she was intrigued by his manner of shelving books. “He has a nice old place which looks like it has been built around bookshelves. He mentioned that he likes to catalog books chronologically so that he can understand development. He quoted Anna Karenina and spoke about how he realized its ending was influenced by the ending of another English novel. I found it pretty interesting,” she says.
Some others of course, prefer a more random method. Samanth Subramanian, author of Following Fish has his collection of books split between Chennai, where his parents live, and Delhi, where he lives. “Five years ago, I split my books in Madras, in a rudimentary manner, between fiction and non-fiction, and then arranged them alphabetically by author. But as I ran out of space on the shelves, I began to stack books more haphazardly. I have no system at all in Delhi; books lie higgledy-piggledy on my desk, on my bed, in shelves, and they are forming an increasingly precarious tower on a low table by my bed. In a way, I've resisted sorting them better; my mind is so set on one day procuring, for myself, those floor-to-ceiling shelves for my home that I feel I can only really arrange them on those shelves, after which I can gaze with affection at my 25 years of book-collecting. A bookshop I visited recently -- Daunt Books, in Marylebone in London -- has precisely such shelves, and it has been the only bookshop where I spent as much time looking at the bookshelves as at the books” he sums it up.
Dream shelves
For those with an appetite for bookshelves, the internet is the ideal place to scout for images of shelves of all kind. Sites like Bookshelf Porn satiate readers and non-readers alike, with photographs of interesting bookshelves from all over the world. Conventional bookshelves, right out of Carl Spitzweg's ‘The Bookworm' and bizarre ones like a circular bookcase or a ‘Bookcase Bed and Desk' adorn Bookshelf Porn. Samanth often browses through bookshelf blogs and web sites hungrily, “looking with particular longing at simple floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crafted out of dark wood.”
