To share yourself is to share your shelf. Like Montaigne’s personal essay, the bookshelf has become a form of self-fashioning, a way of arranging ourselves into being, one hardback at a time. Since Zoom entered our lives, the bookshelf has become the Zoom backdrop du jour, a conscious curation of ourselves that we give to the public. Until this year, I had always felt rather rude examining other people’s bookshelves, as if to delve too deep into their collection would be an act of unashamed voyeurism. Since I got married, my husband’s books now number among my own political biographies next to novels, a literary record of our lives before we met, pages and pages of the past. Brideshead Revisited next to Healing the Child Within.
Alan Bennett certainly thought so: ‘A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.’ Journeying across my own bookshelves I see the spines of my life, not curated or color-coded, but jammed in messily and haphazardly, out of chronological order, just like experience itself.
To cast your eye across someone’s bookshelves is to understand them.
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