posted on 04 Feb 2018

Books Do Furnish A Room?

There are moments in life when looking after your books has to take priority over actually reading them. In my case the past couple weeks has fallen into that bracket as I try and work out how I’m going to fit all my books into my house.

You’ll find that there are a number of rather glitzy coffee-table books about shelving and storing your collection but these all focus more on interior design than on practicality. The shelving ‘solutions’ the authors of these books are so fond of seem to be aimed at people who own a comparatively small collection and who are more concerned with chic than with volume.

We have a lot of books. Believe me, a lot of books. The question for me is how do I find a sensible balance between a house to live in, a library and a hoarder’s den. As our existing freestanding shelves have been double-lined and eventually started overflowing, we had the downstairs back room shelved from floor to ceiling and the alcoves of the living room done at the same time.

This turned out to be just a flimsy gesture as the books mounted and began to take over the upstairs rooms too. So now we’ve had to accept the inevitable and make a choice – either we have a radical weeding of the collection or we have to come up with the money to have the bedrooms shelved in the same way as the downstairs has been done. Bowing to the perverse logic of the obsessed collector we have accepted that there’s very little chance that we’ll weed stuff out and so it’s more shelves.

Working with our very patient and accommodating carpenter we’ve worked out what space we’ve got available to us that will take shelves and work is underway as I write. But it has made me think about the advantages and disadvantages of having most spare stretches of wall covered in bookshelves. Starting with the positives I’d suggest to you :

•        For a start, we don’t have to spend any time thinking about redecoration. Not only can’t you see any wall now, the books are a better backdrop than any wallpaper could provide.
•        There’s every chance we’ll be able to actually see what we’ve got – and maybe, just maybe, we won’t end up buying the same books twice.
•        The house will look tidier  and it might be possible to walk around with falling over books slipped into any space I could find.

But there are problems of course:

•  Who’s going to want to buy a house made of books when it comes time to sell? Our house doesn’t look anything like the houses sold on the television programmes.
• I like having the shelves but I really resent spending the money on having them put up. Just think about all those books I could have bought with the money!
• Finally, and critically, now we’ve used up all the spare room for expanding the shelves, what happens when we run out of space next time? Yikes – do we really have the discipline to stay in bounds?

Ah, well. Nobody ever said collecting books was a breeze and I guess we can reassure ourselves that there aren’t too many burglars who will be keen to steal our treasures – I can’t imagine a swag bag loaded with books….

Anthony Powell’s Books Do Furnish A Room is a title I keep repeating to myself as I watch the shelves multiply…..

 

Terry Potter

February 2018