I'm sure I'm not the only one who, when a writer or other intellectual-type is photographed for a newspaper in front of a bookshelf, spends more time looking at the books than the person. They usually have a few titles you can make out, often the bigger art books. I'm the only person in the country, it seems, who doesn't own a big volume of Klimt.
This picture of Alan Hollinghurst was in yesterday's Observer. It was more generously cropped in the paper so that one could see two more shelves higher than this internet version, and two more below. As luck would have it, this turns out to be predominantly the poetry section of Alan's well-stocked library and he has them in alphabetical order of author and so, once I'd got started, I knew what I was looking for. For example, books by his friend Andrew Motion are just above his left elbow, the orange volume being the memoir, In the Blood. Heaney is to the left of his head as we look; Hughes (Lupercal, Wodwo, etc) is two shelves below; Lowell is two shelves below him; Thom Gunn is just out of shot here, just above and to the left of Alan's head, with the Collected clearly visible and then, once you know, most of the individual volumes readily identifiable.
So, Hollinghurst is unlikely to be bettered in the competition for who has the most books that I also have, the most similar collection, although his inevitably more comprehensive than mine if less completist on specific favourite poets. There was another prize once for who had picked the closest selection of Desert Island Discs to what I would have but I'm afraid I've forgotten who that was.
It's probably a bit impolite in other people's houses to immediately start to scrutinize their books while making a token effort to keep the conversation going but I move on eventually. And then start rifling through their CD's.
