User Submitted Blog Post: Our Shelves, Our Selves

I feel Luc Sante's pain. Over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal, the critic and blogger wrote a fun and engaging essay about the trouble he's had wrangling his book collection. Like much of Sante's writings, it's leavened with lots of perfectly observed details (such as how the trend in trade paperpacks have made books more frustrating to carry around, "except in the dead of winter"). But this is a love story he's written---a tale about how our books are talismen for bits of our lives, and how they can be exceedingly difficult to let go of.

But is it the books that Sante loves, or himself? He writes:

I'm not a snob about books, but I'm probably a show-off -- as who isn't? My showing-off is of a pretty low-key if not completely abstruse sort, though. No one has ever noticed -- much less commented upon -- my collections of minor German Romantics, accounts by UFO abductees, books by and about hoboes, or memoirs by former employees of the New York Evening Graphic. It's rather a closed circle; I impress myself.

It's perfectly unselfish to read and own a lot of books. But as that quote suggests, how you shelve them--and even that you do shelve them--is another matter. Like a lot of heavy readers, I shelve with some concern about appearances---fiction here, nonfiction there, books I turn to often within arms reach, books that feel a little unseemly but which I'm loath to dispose of toward the bottom. Our shelves are our best foot forward; even if we're only impressing ourselves, we shelve with a mind to impress others.

That's partly why I could never get too into a project like LibraryThing, which lets people post listings of their book collections and connect with readers with similar tastes. I have a LibraryThing profile, but it's far from complete, and I doubt I'll get around to fill it out further. That's partly because---well, I like to think I have better things to do with my limited free time than to dutifully log the complete contents of my home library. But I think I've also unconsciously resisted the way that LibraryThing doesn't really allow you explain yourself, or explain why some books reside a little lower on the shelves. Yes, you can give the book a star rating. But the critic in me, already frustrated by low word counts, isn't about to embrace the star system. Yes, I could simply not include certain books that would induce too much status anxiety, but that doesn't seem sporting. It's bad enough to be so narcissistic that you're doing all this cataloging; it's worse to lie to yourself in the midst of doing it.

So in some ways our bookshelves are our anxiety closets---its where our concerns reside, and also the place where we worry about how much weight we give those concerns. Because anybody willing to look can see them, if they're willing to look closely enough.