Bookshelves

There are more bookshelves on Twitter at the moment than the British Library and I am suffering from serious book envy. It just seems cruel to have so many books on display without being able to touch them.

I am missing libraries and bookshops, which is weird because I have plenty on my ‘to be read’ shelf but there’s something very soothing about going into a library, running your hand along the spines and having a good sniff, or going to the bookshop to stroke the beautiful children’s picture books that are about to be published, or to find a second hand bookshop full of forgotten treasure.

Every politician is proving how well read they are. None of them have their zoom call set up in front of a set of Catherine Cookson, or their old Enid Blytons that they can’t bear to part with. No, they have biographies, the complete works of Plato and collections of poetry by Milton, Homer and Virgil.
It’s all making me feel quite inadequate.

There is a current row raging on Twitter about Michael Gove’s bookcase. His wife put a picture of the TV with her husband on and wrote ‘surreal’. This seems like a normal human thing to do to me. However, the TV was in front of a bookcase and instead of asking the important question (How do you get to the books behind the telly?) people wanted to know why he had books about Hitler.  It seems that you are not allowed to own books on subjects you don’t agree with.

Author bookshelves seem more pleasing to me. Less war and more stories. JK Rowling has organised her bookshelf by colour, which has sent librarians twitchy. Talking of a twitchy librarians , there was also the story of a library cleaner who, in the new socially distanced world, unsupervised, took all the books off the shelf to clean and replaced them in size order.

Actually, I think I’ve thought of a solution to my problem. It’s not as if I don’t have time. Let’s have a bookshelf organisation day.

I might start with the cookbook shelf.