What's On My Bookshelf? And Why?

For two years now, I have been a member of LibraryThing.com, a website where you can catalogue your whole library: what joy! As of today, in the wake of some unexpected book-buying, I have catalogued 713 volumes. That doesn’t include dictionaries, cookbooks, Calvin & Hobbes, and the like, but it does include most of my library. The serious books--the history, theology, fiction, poetry, essays, and especially the books on books--are all in there. One of the nice things about LibraryThing is that you know you are in the presence (virtual anyway) of people who understand your weakness. Among the hundreds of online groups you can join is one named Bookshelves: If You Build/Buy Them, They Will Fill.

Oh my, yes. Fill they will.

I live in a small apartment, so probably buying five books today wasn’t my most prudent idea. But prudence is not necessarily a key aspect of a bibliophile’s character. As the minister Henry Ward Beecher writes, “Alas! Where is human nature so weak as in a book-store! Speak of the appetite for drink; or of a bon-vivant’s relish for dinner! What are these mere animal throes and ragings compared with those fantasies of taste, of those yearnings of the imagination, of those insatiable appetites of intellect, which bewilder a student in a great bookseller’s temptation-hall?” (250).

Amen. Preach it, brother!

I already have stacks of books crowding in front of the books that are standing neatly together on the shelves. As Adrian Joline says, dear old friends of books “sometimes [lament] because the shelves are not exactly adapted to the association of fellow-books so that we fear that they will not be as friendly one to another as would like to have them…. what more agreeable work may he find than that of assorting the books, so that… their skyline be less jagged than that of lower New York…” (43). Unfortunately, my shelves resemble New York less than they do, say, New Delhi.

Sigh. More later.


Beecher, Henry Ward. “Bookstores, Books.” Star Papers. New York: J. C. Derby, 1855.
Joline, Adrian H. At the Library Table. Boston: Gorham Press, 1910.