Bookish Diversions: Surrounded by Books

Nurtured by Books, Bookshelf Wealth, Book-Wrapt, Organizing Chaos, More

¶ Our precious collections. Nasser Al-Dhafiri began collecting books in his Kuwait home as a fourteen year old boy, starting with two books found salvaged from abandoned house and a rickety, reclaimed dresser upon which to display them. As the years progressed he amassed a significant collection, though his father mocked Nasser’s preoccupation with books. “They snatch your money and your eyesight,” he said. Secretly, however, his father was proud of his son’s collection and pledged to stay with the books when the Iraqi army invaded and the family fled. They were too precious to leave unguarded.

Photo by Guzel Maksutova on Unsplash

¶ Nurtured by books. It’s hard to overestimate the value of a personal library. I’ve written here before about the benefits; I listed five, though of course there are many others. The pluses so manifestly outweigh the minuses that serious readers will do almost anything to build their collections. It’s like an impulse, an instinct, something pre-rational. We scarcely ever consider the negatives; are there any worth seriously pondering? Nah. Insufficient funds or space? Minor irritants, not obstacles. We get creative.

Nigerian-American writer

Zito Madu

grew up in a crowded home that if measured in monetary terms must surely register as poor. Measured in both familial and literary terms, however, Madu’s home was rich indeed. “It was important to my parents that we . . . have a library at home,” Madu explains in an essay for Plough.

After years of moving around, including across continents, when we finally settled in the house where my parents still live today, an entire room was set aside to be the library. It was tremendously impractical with our family of eight, with everyone doubling up to fit in the limited space. Arguments, fights, friendships, alliances, and temporary allegiances were all part of the pressure of that closeness and lack of privacy. The use of another bedroom would have alleviated this pressure, but my parents refused that possibility. The room was the library and that was that.

Having emigrated from Africa, both of Madu’s parents lived on meager teacher salaries but the filled their personal library nonetheless. “To fill the shelves,” said Madu, “they would bring home discarded or donated books from the schools they taught at. Teaching didn’t pay much, and it still doesn’t, but it furnished our home library with everything from standard textbooks about math and physics to well-worn copies of the classics—literary, fantasy and sci-fi.”

Zito Madu. Image credit: Secret Base

While Madu spent many years of his youth playing video games, his interest eventually cooled and the home library was there, waiting for him. “I read many things in that new fever,” he recalls, elaborating:

The ones that are still very clear now were the Shakespeare plays, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, Things Fall Apart, which seems to be required for Nigerian children as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is for Americans. I also read that and Huckleberry Finn. Their Eyes Were Watching God still pains me to this day; so does The Bluest Eye and the collected essays of James Baldwin. I read so many other things as well—the Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian myths, which then led to an interest in the myths of other regions and civilizations. Haitian mythology and folktales were a quick path towards understanding the world, imperial violence, and race in a radical way. There was also the Redwall series alongside Tender Is the Night. I could go on forever about the books in that library.

Madu’s personal story reads like an elaboration on this observation from designer Emily Grosvenor: “A personal library is nothing less than a soulful archive of the ever-changing self.”

For what it’s worth, I’ve reviewed both Things Fall Apart and Their Eyes Were Watching God, not to mention beautiful African émigré memoirs from Wayétu Moore and Mary-Alice Daniel. Why is that germane? Because Madu has his own memoir coming out in a couple months, published by

Anne Trubek

’s very own Belt Publishing. The elusive but intriguing title? The Minotaur at Calle Lanza. It’s out in April and perfect for adding to your own personal library.

¶ Bookshelf wealth? Humans like to name things. If we can distinguish one thing from another, we need a separate name for it. Hence bookshelf wealth, a home-décor term used to describe high-end casual spaces with loads of books. “These aren’t display books,” says interior designer Kailee Blalock, explaining the term in a viral TikTok video. “These are books that have actually been curated and read.”

I’m a fan, but given Al-Dhafiri and Madu’s stories above—not to mention many of our own collections at one time or another—I think we can stretch the definition to encompass humble libraries extravagantly built and lovingly cared for. Is there a better term for what personal libraries represent for their owners than bookshelf wealth?

Photo by Haley Carman on Unsplash

¶ Carried away while sitting at home. Another great term? Book-wrapt. Presbyterian minister and computer systems architect Reid Byers coined the term for his book, The Private Library: The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom. Wrapt? “The fusty spelling is no affectation,” says Julie Lasky in a wonderful piece on home libraries, “but an efficient packing of meaning into a tight space (which, when you think of it, also describes many libraries). To be surrounded by books is to be held rapt in an enchanted circle and to experience the rapture of being transported to other worlds.”

Whether extravagant or lowly, Lasky goes right to the heart of why our collections mean so much to us. “Individually, they are frequently useful or delightful, but it is when books are displayed en masse that they really work wonders,” she says. “Covering the walls of a room, piled up to the ceiling and exuding the breath of generations, they nourish the senses, slay boredom and relieve distress.“

¶ What goes in a good home library? A bit of everything: books of interest, books of potential interest, books for work, books for pleasure, books for growth, books for fun, books to study, books to browse, books you finish, books you quit, books you want to read but never start, books you come back to, books that change your thinking, books with that one bit on page 149 you dog-eared and underlined, knowing you’d eventually use it, though you haven’t figured out how, but, still, no worries—that’s why you have a library in the first place, isn’t it?

Like most writers, for Pulitzer-winning novelist Jennifer Egan the library contains both old memories and the seeds of new projects. She invited the Washington Post to tour her library. While scanning shelves, she saw a reference book she needed. “This is immediately relevant to what I’m doing,” she said, taking the volume down to relocate to her writing room.

“Sometimes I buy things because I know they’ll be relevant, but I don’t yet know how or why,” Egan said. She keeps a lot of print reference work. “Physical artifacts are for me very generative, in a way that total access to everything but without any physical container”—that is, on the internet—“is not. . . . There’s just this kind of poignancy about physical artifacts that nothing digital can match.”

Counterintuitively, Egan also praised fiction for its research value. “If you’re looking for the maximum quantity of information, you can’t beat it,” she explained, “because it contains all the things that went without saying. History is all about saying what needs to be said; fiction tells a story, and then it tells the story the writer didn’t know they were telling—didn’t know they had to tell.”

¶ Realizing a dream. As British novelist Lucy Mangan and her husband shopped for a new home, they came upon something special. While the house itself didn’t measure up to their hopes, the prospective property showcased an outbuilding by the garden they could convert into a library. It featured, said Mangan,

plastered walls, a flagstoned floor, three sets of french doors opening on to the garden: it was, clearly, a library in waiting.

The fulfilment of the only ambition I have held in life was standing before me: a room of my own, with every one of my books around me. There are about 8,000 of the buggers, thanks to more than 40 years of devoted reading and an unwillingness to let go of old friends.

Mangan contacted her friend, a carpenter. While he built shelving, she picked out paints—“Calke Green” and “Sudbury” yellow, as it happened. Her real job, of course, was shelving all those titles with some sort of useful logic. Coincidentally, the pandemic had just set in and Mangan benefitted from the project. “As the world outside filled with uncertainties and the government proved new incompetencies at every turn,” she said, “I felt better for bringing a tiny bit of order out of chaos where I could.”

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

¶ Creating order. Some scholars would say the opening passage of Genesis, with the spirit of God brooding over the waters and then dividing day from night and the waters above from those below, reflects a primeval myth of the divine waging successful war on chaos.

What’s the connection to personal libraries? Jewish and Christian thinkers have long compared creation to a book. By the time of Galileo, a somewhat secularized—and maybe secularizing—distinction was well cemented between the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture.

Now, take those two ideas and add a third: In his commentary on Genesis St. Augustine says that God created the world instantaneously but offered the days of creation described in Genesis as a way to express putting everything in recognizable order. So, if God is bringing order to chaos, and nature is a book, then perhaps creation is simply God organizing his library.

¶ Organizing your own library. Back to interior designer Kailee Blalock: “These are books that have actually been curated and read,” she said when describing bookshelf wealth. It’s hard to imagine an enjoyable home library that isn’t curated. That’s part of what it means to enjoy books—to put them in order, to place them in relationship to each other, to browse and shuffle and reorganize.

Designer Emily Grosvenor, who we met earlier, has ideas organizing your personal library. So does editor Freya Howarth, who contributes one idea sure to enrich a home library; she suggests identifying your personal classics, your individual canon. That arrangement might include the widely recognized greats along with some books that simply speak singularly to you. “These are the books that you keep coming back to, keep thinking about, and that are points of comparison for everything that comes after,” she says. “Your old favourites can be a reliable source of solace.”

¶ Organizing as an act of self-revelation.

I marvel that the complexity of the human heart can be expressed in the arrangement of one’s books. Inside this paper universe, I find sense within confusion, calm within a storm, the soothing murmur of hundreds of books communing with their neighbors. Opening them reveals treasured passages gently underlined in pencil; running my hand over the Mylar-wrapped hardcovers reminds me of how precious they are. Not just the books themselves, but the ideas within, the recollections they evoke.

—Leslie Kendall Dye, “The Organization of Your Bookshelves Tells Its Own Story”

A lovely bedroom in Harlem with floor-to-ceiling books. Photo by Bassmon

¶ More than we can ever manage. Building a library offers a great reminder of our finitude. There are simply too many books out there. But that’s a plus, not a problem.

I like to be in a room where I’ve read half the books, and I’d like there to be enough books that I cannot possibly read them in my remaining years.

—Rev. Reid Byers

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Make sure you also read . . .

• Why Build a Personal Library?

• Keep or Toss? My Personal Criteria for Culling a Library

• Our Libraries Tell Us Stories, if We Listen (Q&A with Stuart Kells)

• The Bookcase as World’s Most Underrated UI

• The Books You Come Back To