Library Re-organisation

 A lot of websites like this one, ostensibly about books, feature pictures of shelves of books. It probably involves some braggadocio, implying that if I've read all these books I must be very wise by now, but it's interesting to see what they've got.

It's no different here. But the recent expansion of the library is an excuse for a sort of exhibitionist guided tour. It's by no means on the scale of the project Larkin oversaw at Hull University but it matters to me.

It began by making the small upstairs room into a place to read. That involved clearing the floor of the piles of papers and making use of the front bedroom. I found three ideal bookcases in a second-hand shop and they were delivered yesterday. 

Very broadly, poetry is downstairs and fiction upstairs, so the two identical smaller bookcases went upstairs to house the collections of fiction that are not on the A-Z shelves. Thus, Graham Swift and Sebastian Faulks share the top shelf of one and Julian Barnes and Alan Hollinghurst the other. Richmal Crompton almost fills a shelf herself and lines up next to Richard Yates and Raymond Carver. On the third level, art books, predominantly Maggi Hambling catalogues, are next door to Murakami and, fittingly, at the bottom, are files of university and sixth form work that somehow got me a 2:1. The shelf above on the left might be needed for Music once the CD's need another shelf downstairs and on the right are old newspaspers, like a long run of the TLS, Danny Baker's old columns from The Times, old Racing Posts and other highly
significant historic moments.

Not much has changed on the shelves in what is left of the newly developed room. George Eliot has her own shelf on a small bookcase that includes Danny Baker, Alexei Sayle and other memoirs, including Me, Moir by Vic Reeves. But the room gains a chair, a Canaletto, a Rothko and a CD player with a resident 10 disc set of Haydn Piano Sonatas. One could listen to them all day, literally. They add up to 11 and a half hours of music. It's likely that that much of anybody would do some damage to one's reason and I'm certainly not going to try it with Philip Glass.

 

Downstairs, I hadn't realized that the larger bookcase was taller than the one there already and so the expansion of poets's biographies across two adjacent shelves doesn't put them in a straight line but moving three volumes on Larkin to there means that the Larkin shelf below is a better fit. From Dante to Hughes, with four volumes on Auden and the whole bottom two shelves devoted to Shakespeare biography, it's a reading list in itself. All the possible reasons why a misfit becomes a poet must be in there somewhere.

On the left we then go Edward Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Sean O'Brien, then below, much pre-C20th before the Auden section. Under them is some 'theory', T.S. Eliot and across the way are still the Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin shelves with Rosemary Tonks and some reference books. In the corner are C20th anthologies, some Dr. Johnson and, if you haven't been mentioned yet, you're in the A-Z poetry which in a previous re-shuffle, brought the more eminent names to the front (Mahon, Kleinzahler) because they are doubled up. I have to remember where those hidden behind are likely to be.

There is a sort of order to it. I should still know where to find most things and, as such, although it's always going to be an ongoing job, it provides its own sort of satisfaction.