MaHB Books

Is your ultimate home-improvement fantasy a ceiling-to-floor library? Then you’d better have a system of categorisation that befits it.
By Emily Ding

There’s much to like about digital books—no worrying over the creasing of spines and accidentally dog-eared pages, to the ability to highlight and make notes that can be edited and erased, to immediately looking up the dictionary—but there’s one unchangeable reason why people still buy physical books: they brighten up a shelf. And if you’re a big reader, categorising becomes more than just an afterthought, especially if you regard your library as an object for posterity.

There are many ways to do it: by genre, for instance, though that’s harder and less intuitive these days with highbrow fiction increasingly co-opting genre, especially dystopia and fantasy. I have Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, along with the Hunger Games, Game of Thrones and X-Files series, together in a pigeonhole, but I also wonder if Justin Cronin’s Passage trilogy and Joyce Carol Oates’ The Accursed belong here too? And Margaret Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids? Or, wait… should the likes of King and Gaiman even be on a different shelf in the first place? And why? For some, rationalising your library this way is just too much trouble, so they might go by pure aesthetics instead: alphabet, book size or spine colour—but even this isn’t as simple as it seems. Case in point: I’ve seen “shelf porn” pictures in which all the books are wrapped in plain white paper, with the titles scribbled onto the spine in black marker, to achieve a more uniform look.

I once grouped my books simply by how much I liked them. My favourites would sit on the most accessible shelves, so I could re-read them; and the rest would languish wherever there was space. These days, ideally, I’d like to do it autobiographically—the way Rob does in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity with his vinyl collection: arrange books in the order and the manner that I discovered them. But, if I were to go further than lip service, it would mean I’d have to find some way to relate every book I’ve read to a certain point in my life, to find some meaning, which is a height of psychoanalysis too daunting for everyday life, and would likely paralyse me for the next read.

So, in the end, I’ve settled for a fairly simple system: fiction down one wall, non-fiction down the other. Fiction is ordered by author grouped with their peers: so Evelyn Waugh sits next to Steinbeck as modern-classic heavyweights; Daniel Alarcón next to Nicole Krauss as “young writers” (ie under 40 in the writing world). Nonfiction is ordered by geography (continents, specifically—though Cuba and China get their own pigeonholes), and occasionally by subject matter (trial by jury and war—dominated, unsurprisingly, by Sebastian Junger).

''Okay, but be honest. Where’s the embarrassing stuff? ''you ask. What, like the Twilight trilogy? Danielle Steel paperbacks? Amateur-level smut? [See footnote.] They are, of course, located in high, shadowed recesses, so strategically placed as to be overlooked.

FOONOTE:

If you were a ‘90s teenage bookworm and have ever frequented the venerable SS2 institution called Novel House in Petaling Jaya, where your impressionable self was left to wander around on your own, especially in the vast wasteland of the far-right aisles, you wouldn’t judge.