In the past, as I purchased books—sometimes singly, sometimes in volume—they simply squeezed their way in among the current residents. It’s been a pleasing arrangement. I love books, and I love the mix of colors, textures, typefaces, designs, sizes, subjects and authors on my shelves because of my fit-it-in-where-I-can arrangement.

While it is aesthetically pleasing, it has lately reached a point where I am coming to realize that my accumulation of books is becoming a substitute for mastery of their knowledge. If it’s on the shelf, I reasoned, I know the information. Or the other trap: I've been wanting a book on [this subject]: I'll read this someday. And this: Well, I’ve got this book on X so I really need this follow-up volume on Y and I’ll get the one on Z when it is published. Good grief.

What I’ve recently come to realize is that there is greater pleasure in having real relationships with my books—in reading them, returning to them and in shelving them with other volumes that I like and genuinely appreciate—than in the haphazard and reckless act of amassing them. To collect and keep for no other reason than to have them means I have become their custodian rather than their friend, and that is where I went wrong. So I have begun retaking control of the relationship.

The first step was to clean out my shelves, no small problem. Like all booklovers, I find it easier to add than subtract. I also have a dual personality and a brain that operates its right and left sides simultaneously and happily. I am a highly creative person with all the dislike of organizational systems natural to that type, but I am also a natural organizer with a strong preference for neatness and orderliness in an artistic arrangement. I dislike having to search for anything; ergo, everything in my home has its assigned spot.

My book collection, though, is the antithesis of this organizational lifestyle. Books are stacked, lumped, packed and mounded in the bedroom, living room, hallway, kitchen and bathroom. Any flat surface is in distinct danger of being disarrayed by a book or two or more. As George and Karen Grant in Shelf Life put it: “ . . . every true Reader is also a stacker.” The newcomers must therefore find room wherever they can, making this part of my home a visual and literary kaleidoscope.

Admittedly, some organization does exist, but it is sporadic and usually dictated by practicalities like size and weight. Art and fine art photography books—invariably oversized and ungainly—weigh a lot, and to shelve them anywhere but on the bottom is impossibly hard on the bookcases. Conversely, the closer to the floor they are, the harder it is for me to pick them up. (No solution is perfect.)

In The Book on the Bookshelf, a wonderful exploration of the development of bookshelves (and their contents), Henry Petroksi offers an amusing and extensive appendix that details more than 25 ways to organize a library. He starts with the obvious—authors’ last names, title, subject—and goes on through the intriguing, to the unusual, the odd and finally the outrageous. The latter includes organizing by provenance, subtitle, author’s first name, opening sentence, closing sentence, dust jackets, number of words and more.

Because the majority of my books are nonfiction, subject seemed the most likely solution. So early one recent Saturday morning, I began writing out potential groupings on pieces of paper, laying them around me on the floor. I ran into trouble almost immediately. Most of the books, I discovered, fit equally well into two, three and even four categories. Each decision became a monumental debate, and when you are dealing with hundreds of books time spent like this adds up quickly.

I had started after breakfast. By lunchtime (which I missed), the floor resembled an obstacle course, making bathroom trips slightly hazardous. When the dinner hour passed unheeded and the clock pointed toward bedtime, I felt desperation set in. I had been at it for more than ten uninterrupted hours. The bookcases were stripped bare, nearly 40 signs littered the floor and piles of books stood in ragged stacks around each piece of paper. And I was no closer to being done than I had been hours before.

I did the only thing I could. I went to bed, which turned out to be the best thing, because by the time I woke up, I had the answer: cull those books that were there only to assure me that I was a genuine bibliophile, books I had bought to own rather than learn from.

That startling but not unpleasant realization meant that once I let those old and unwanted lovers go that those I still loved would find their right places. So I have been doing that over the last week, and I now have nearly 200 volumes stacked in a living room that corner that resembles a small built-of-books city. These are the ones that I can live without. These are the discarded lovers who have gave me what I needed when I bought them. But they are also the ones that, like some past boyfriends, were acquired them in various fits of vanity, and I find I actually don’t want them.

A few years ago, the essayist Joseph Epstein wrote a piece in which he described the experience of culling his personal library. When he was finished he said that he felt something akin to Henry James when the latter once shaved his beard: he felt light. That’s what I want to feel. Now that I’ve nearly completed the culling of my own shelves, it’s how I am feeling. Liberated. Light. Free. And ready to renew my relationships with the lovers I really want.


Since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to almost anyone who will listen. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it