Are you an owner of books, or a collector of books? How do you arrange your books on the shelf, what do you do with a damaged book, and how do you get rid of books you no longer want? These are just some of the questions asked, and answered, in a delightful and most helpful new work, Looking After Your Books by Francesca Galligan. The book is rich in anecdotes and historical information (did you know that Lewis Carroll liked to write his name in his books with purple ink?), and it really makes you think about the books you treasure and how you treat them.
I often agonise over the best way to arrange my books (does Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen belong with the other biographies of Jane Austen that I own, or should it go alongside Tomalin’s other biographies of authors such as Pepys and Hardy?) or should I follow the example of Gwyneth Paltrow and Marie Kondo (who stupidly thinks you should only own about 10 books anyway) who arrange their books according to colour, forming a rainbow spectrum on the shelf?
Looking After Your Books has useful information on book repair, whether or not to write your name in a book and how much other information you might think of including (I usually add the year in which I bought the book), the use of bookplates, choosing special bindings for books, dealing with invasive insects and when a volume might need to spend time in the freezer (something the author suggests surprisingly often). Writing in the margins is something we are told NOT to do at school, but how fascinating to learn that King Henry VIII adjusted the tenth commandment in a book he owned, adding that coveting one’s neighbour’s wife is only a sin when done “wrongly or unjustly”.
Book shelves have a way of filling up incredibly quickly and sometimes pruning needs to be done. Again, Galligan gives useful tips about sending unwanted books to prisons or schools, charity shops, selling them online, or simply giving them to where they can find new homes and owners. I found so much of interest as I read, and feel this is a book that well deserves space on my very crowded bookshelves. Reading it also made me resolve to dust my books far more often than I do.
Are you an Owner or a Collector? How often do you dust your books? Tell me your book secrets in a comment.
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Jenny Gray
My difficulty comes about because I share a limited bookshelf space in my small apartment with my husband. I categorise my books into Authors (say all my Peter Carey novels) and themes (movie and actors biographies). Then my husband comes along and moves my “insignificant” books to make space for his “Music” books, bios etc. If there were ever a reason for divorce, this would be the sole reason! Haha!
Susannah Fullerton
I do appreciate that problem. My husband has books that are never looked at and which take up a lot of shelf space, and then tells me to get rid of some of my books!
Graham H.
How do we all organise our books? It’s a good question. Me, I have ten general sections in my house (same number as Dewey Decimal) but mine are: 1. Natural history (includes astronomy) 2. Robin Hood 3. Language (includes dictionaries and magic books, grammars and grimoires, spelling and spells) 4. Mathematics (includes humour and jokes – because they are all “puzzles”) 5. Poetry (whole book-cases for that) 6. Political economy (which also includes finance, ethics, economics) 7. Fairy Tales 8. Novels alphabetically by author (with novel next to associated DVD) 9. Rembrandt and 10 Music. Plus “miscellaneous”, obviously, (and with extra tall shelves for books that are too tall to fit in the right place). But then – you also start collecting books by and about particular people. So – bookcases each dedicated to people like: Yeats; Dickens; Richmal Crompton; Wagner; Kipling; Shakespeare; King Arthur; Jane Austen (of course!); Sylvia Plath; Frank Richards; Edgar Allan Poe; Joseph Conrad (goes with Existentialism books); William Blake (goes with neo-Platonism books); and Agatha Christie (goes with detective fiction books). And – just checking the shelves – I also appear to have accumulated 97 different Biggles books. As to the other questions, I deal with broken books by putting rubber bands around the bits; I deal with running out of space by building more bookshelves; and I deal with dusting books by taking them off the shelves and reading them.
Damaris Wilson
Thank you for that marvellous comment! I sense a fellow booklover there … I wish more people like you gravitated to my tiny bookspace (too small to call it a shop). I put DVDs alongside the relevant books but customers (who come in for the antiques and ‘retro’ in other stalls) seem not to understand …
Susannah Fullerton
I can’t get to any bookshelf fast enough – always so fascinating to see what books people have collected, and it tells you so much about them.
Susannah Fullerton
Oh I do love this theory that books in one’s collection will find their own place. Just when you think you have them all beautifully sorted, you acquire something enw, that won’t fit on that same shelf, or changes the whole amount of space needed for a particulr topic of author. I think I’ll now just leave it up to my books to deal with the problem in their own way. I know that it is the Jane Austen collection which will always be paramount amongst my books, and as long as they are OK, the rest will look after themselves.
Chris Browne
Dear Susannah
Thanks for your interesting newsletter; always a joy to receive on the first of every month. Re Owner or Collector, I think that given the title of your book on literary felines, you could have called this section “Collectors, and the books that collected them!” This is because the Confucian and Zen parts of my brain thinks that books have called to me and insisted that they become part of my collection and who am I, a mere mortal, to naysay them.
That having been said, you may think that, as a collector, that you have cleverly arranged your books based upon some particular organisational theme, such as subject, author, publisher, language etc, or even, for the frustrated librarians out there, by Dewey number. However, whatever your intention, the books will find their own places in your house, and will demand to be placed where they feel is to their greatest advantage. Sometimes this might be hiding behind the sofa rather than being on their proper shelf, or perhaps, a Regency novel might decide to “slum it” among the trashy airport paperbacks that seem to sneak in to the house unnoticed.
It seems that some books are highly skilled at encouraging so many of their sisters, cousins and aunts to join them somehow on your selves, so that no longer does their particular bookcase offer adequate accommodation, and so you, the collector, is forced to organise a move for them to more spacious accommodation. I find that books by and about Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling are particularly adept at this tactic.
I also find that infestation can also be a problem, with birds being a particular problem, and I am always inundated by Penguins, Pelicans, Puffins, and Ptarmigans (yes they are books too) all jostling for a place of prominence.
In spite of all of these issues, I heartily recommend the acquisition and temporary housing offered by collectors to itinerant books as a worthy, honorable and satisfying occupation for every one of the wise ladies and gentlemen who subscribe to this much-loved newsletter.
So keep on answering the Call of the Book.
Best wishes
Chris Browne