Rearranging my books

It is time, once more, for me to rearrange my books. A visit to a couple of second-hand bookshops resulted in a bagful of titles to add to the collection, and such is the tight squeeze on some of the shelves that I need a rethink. Space must be created at more than one point along the shelves, so that coherence as well as space is maintained. It will probably mean a few books departing the flat and heading for Oxfam (where I shall probably see them a few days thereafter and think how good it would be to have them back on my shelves once more).

I have a collection of around 3,000 books, dispersed across four rooms and a hallway. It’s not a vast number by some standards, though a good deal more than most homes. It is, as things stand, a finite collection. I cannot ad any more to it without some books having to go. Of course, I could always cram in extra shelves if I needed to, but this could only be in places where I would rather not have shelves, for aesthetic and practical reasons. I want the home to be full of books, but not oppressively so. A finite collection is therefore what it must be, for the time being.

A collection of such a size needs ordering. It’s the librarian in me that naturally thinks in such a way, but I have quite a number of books used for reference purposes, and I need to be able to find them. I also occasionally need to find out whether I already have a book before I go out and buy it again (this can happen). And I just like to know where things are. Therefore how the books are arranged is of importance to me, and how they should be ordered is something I have worried about for far too long – because the perfect ordering of books is an impossibility.

How should you arrange a book collection? Most people do not arrange their book collections at all and instead rely either on luck or on memory to find the book they are looking for. Memory is not a bad idea. The mind, particularly if it is a book-minded mind, is attuned to the shapes, colour and titles of books, aided by the strategies of publishers that make book spines eye-catching. Such strategies then link to space, enabling one such as me to say, I remember where that book by X is, it’s red in colour and it is somewhere low down on the large shelves in the sitting room. But inevitably the value of such a system decreases with the number of book that you have.

Arranging books alphabetically by author is the regular way of ordering a substantial collection, but it is not entirely satisfactory. One might want to have a special collection – such as the ones I have on film and news – where it is far more valuable to have these shelved together rather than succumb to the thematic randomness of alphabetical order. Moreover, I don’t always remember who the author of a book was, particularly if it is not a novel and I bought it for its subject matter rather than its writer. I would have to have a subject catalogue, and though part of me quite likes the idea of a set of card indexes, that way absurdity lies – for a domestic collection at least.

Likewise having books ordered by subject only works for non-fiction works (unless I was to, say shelve War and Peace among books I have on war, or Russia). A broadly thematic approach works up to a point, so it is useful to have the film, news, sport, music or art books gathered together (maybe arranged alphabetically within each category), then have novels, poetry, essays and so on shelved together. But for some subjects I only have the one book, and I like the idea of the works of an author coming together on the shelves if at all possible (so Graham Greene’s novels, travel books and film criticism belong together, ideally).

Or I could be playful. Why not arrange the books by date of publication? It could be original date of publication or the date of the edition that I have. This could be fun. If I chose the original date of publication, the collection would start with Gilgamesh (c. 2100–1200 BC), then Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (c.8th-century BC). It would be an education ands make for an interesting display, until works from recent years, where there would be too many with no real value in such chronological order. If I went for publication date of edition, the collection would start with The Tablet of Memory, a listing of facts and figures dating from 1809, followed by The Bagman’s Bioscope (1824), a collection of historical anecdotes. Again, entertaining to construct but of limited practical use, as both chronological arrangements would require a catalogue.

Equally whimsical would be to order my books by date of purchase, or when they were given to me. If so the collection would probably begin with Longfellow’s Hiawatha (I think I was eight when it was given to me), hotly followed by John Masefield’s The Box of Delights and The Faber Book of Children’s Verse, as books I have had since primary school days. Such an arrangement would have huge autobiographical value, but my memory is just not good enough to remember when every single book came into the collection. And again there would need to be a catalogue.

Another arrangement could be historical chronology. This would certainly be entertaining. The collection would have to start with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, followed by some world histories and then Gilgamesh. This would be instructive to a degree, with debates to be had on where a book covering a long period of history should be shelved (by the earliest date covered or the last?). Of course, not every book could be sensibly associated with any historical period bar the period in which it was published, so the exercise would have limited value. But I do like the idea of starting with the Big Bang…

What else? Arranging books by colour is a gimmick for designers only. Arranging them by size – whether height or width – would be pointless. Price? Alphabetical by title? By quality, with least favoured books first and ending with the most treasured? Or what about not when I acquired them but where, with books from favoured second-hand shops kept always together, as a memory of the hunt?

The question underlying all this is, why order books? In his essay ‘Unpacking My Library’ Walter Benjamin – a true hunter of books – separates collecting from the collection:

… the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?

For Benjamin, his book collection was a trigger to the “chaos of memories” engendered by the collecting process. It is unclear how his books were actually ordered on his shelves, but he adds that “if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, there is the order of its catalogue”. Perhaps Benjamin ordered his books physically according to where he had tracked them down. Certainly he did so mentally, as his essay makes clear. The point is that the order must relate to the collection’s purpose. It is not simply about finding books; it is about the collection as a reflection of the self.

My books are ordered by a combination of author and subject. They are mostly in alphabetical order by author, but for some subjects where I am more likely to remember the book for what is about than who wrote it, then subject wins out. Some parts of the collection are shelved separately, for convenience’s sake, with the film section somewhat chaotically arranged because of the different size of shelves in the room that holds them, meaning that they cannot be ordered purely by author or subject. For film, I must rely on memory to locate what I need.

But arrangement is not the same as order. The arrangement, for me, is not that of a collector’s passion, but of a desire for the perfect relationship between the books. There is somewhere, in my mind’s eye, an entirely harmonious arrangement of shape, colour, condition, author and subject, which says that finally I have found all of the books that I would want, that reflects my passions and interests and experience as a reader. But I never get there. There is always one book that looks out of place, or the sense of a gap which the book which I desire but do not have as yet might fill, only once I had found it and added it to the shelves then a fresh imbalance occurs. The books are never settled; they must always be rearranging themselves.

Were they ever to settle in a supposedly perfect arrangement, there would be nothing for it but for me to stop reading. And I can never do that.