Alexander McCall Smith displayed uncanny timing in asking his Twitter followers this week for ideas on organising books, as this most sensitive issue for bookworms is the subject of Leah Price's new book, Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books. A treat for the nosy, dominated by photos of writers' libraries, it shows attitudes diverging just as they did in responses to McCall Smith, who dismissed alphabetical and spine-colour ordering as "obsessive-compulsive disorder", but seems to favour semi-ordering rather than randomness, with a "guilt shelf" for titles that "should" be read.
In Price's interviews, approaches to shelving range from Jonathan Lethem's candid anality ("my books are always organised, arranged, and always being rearranged . . . I tend to oscillate between alphabetical absolutism and imperatives of genre, subject, size, colour, publisher") to the stoical acceptance by Philip Pullman that entropy is inevitable ("foreign editions of my own books crowd in from all over the world like eels making for the river where they were spawned").
On his higgledy-piggledy shelves, WC Fields screenplays and a gardening book jostle Martin Gilbert's The Holocaust, just as on those of Gary Shteyngart a DVD of The Sopranos interrupts a run of Russian titles, and nestling amid the scholarly tomes of Steven Pinker and his philosopher-novelist wife, Rebecca Goldstein, is The Great Book of Tantra, a collection of erotic texts and images.
Pullman and Shteyngart's shared wish to be "surprised" as they scan their shelves will strike a chord with many readers, as will other authors' reflections. "There is always at least a 100-book margin between what I own and what I've read," notes Junot Diaz. "I love my books," declares Claire Messud, "but I sometimes wish they'd just vanish. To be weighed down by things – books, furniture – seems somehow terrible."
