As a teenaged babysitter, I went straight for the books. No sooner did the door close behind the spruced-up parents than I was on the prowl: the bedside table for erotica, the kitchen counter for cookbooks, the toilet top for magazines, and finally the official living room shelves. Only then did I scan the refrigerator. The French gastronome Brillat-Savarin would have approved: he began his Physiology of Taste (1826) by declaring, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”
You are also what you read—or, perhaps, what you own. In my college dorm, a volume of Sartre was spread-eagled across the futon when I expected callers. We display books that we’ll never crack; we hide books that we thumb to death. Few households shelve Playboy next to Plath. Junot Díaz lays his soul on the line when he declares, “I’ve never liked the idea of a hidden book. It means no one will ever randomly pick it up and have a conversation with you about it.”
To expose a bookshelf is to compose a self. Buzz Spector’s 1994 installation Unpacking My Library consisted of all the books in the artist’s library, arranged in order of the height of spine, from tallest to shortest, on a single shelf in a room large enough to hold them. Shortly after the 2008 election, a bookstore in New York set out fifty-odd books to which Barack Obama had alluded in memoirs, speeches, and interviews. The resulting table revealed more about the president-elect than did any number of other bookstores that displayed books by and about him.
A self without a shelf remains cryptic; a home without books naked. The dollhouse given to Queen Mary in 1924 contained Lilliputian versions of the Times for January 1, as well as Who’s Who, Whitaker’s Almanac, and a railway timetable. The Times published several thousand copies to distribute to Mary’s young subjects, with one difference: in response to mothers’ anxieties that the one-inch-to-the-foot scale might strain children’s eyes, the mass-produced model doubled the size.
In keeping with tiny toilets that flushed, Queen Mary’s library was, so to speak, anatomically correct: its pages could be opened, turned, even read. Many life-sized books are less functional. Any user of the vast virtual remainder table that is Google Books knows that titles are divided into “bookshelves.” What they may not know is that in Google’s Cambridge office, one wall is occupied by a different kind of bookshelf. A dozen flat strips of plywood are fixed to the wall at right angles to equally flat vertical strips of paper, each bearing the title of a book. These strips were once the spines of books; the volumes from which they were sliced have been disbound for scanning. Like taxidermists’ trophies, the wall decor attests a successful slaughter. A cluster of yellow spines ripped from the “For Dummies” series reminds viewers that dummy spines have a long history.
In the early 1830s, Thomas Hood designed a set of dummy spines for a library staircase in the Duke of Devonshire’s grand country house at Chatsworth, supplementing traditional fake-book titles like “Plain Dealings” and “Essays on Wood” with puns like “Pygmalion. By Lord Bacon.” A few decades later, Charles Dickens lined his own study with dummy spines, for which he composed titles like “History of a Short Chancery Suit” (in twenty-one volumes) and “Cat’s Lives” (in nine).
Our twentieth-century term “coffee-table book” inherits the scornful overtones of its predecessor, “furniture book.” An 1859 article of that title compared bibliophiles who cared more about bindings than about words to lovers who “think more of the jewels of one’s mistress than of her native charms.” A millennium and a half before print, Seneca had already criticized “those who displayed scrolls with decorated knobs and colored labels rather than reading them”: “How can you excuse the man who buys bookcases of expensive wood…. It is in the homes of the idlest men that you find the biggest libraries.”
This translation takes some liberties, of course: what we think of as the traditional bookshelf is in fact younger than Gutenberg. Until a few centuries ago, books were shelved every which way except straight up and spine outward: laid flat, or turned fore-edge out, or placed on bookwheels that rotated multiple volumes into the reader’s reach like cars on a Ferris wheel. Spines were rarely even labeled, for books were not expected to be shelved with the back visible. As the engineer Henry Petroski puts it, “The vertical book on a horizontal shelf is not a law of nature.” Today, however, bookshelves are among the most ubiquitous of mass-produced goods: Ikea alone has manufactured twenty-eight million Billy bookcases.
Books know their place: some pose on the shelf, others skulk beneath the bed. In 1747, the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his son:
I knew a gentleman, who was so good a manager of his time, that he would not even lose that small portion of it, which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets, in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, carried them with him to that necessary place, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained; and I recommend you to follow his example. It is better than only doing what you cannot help doing at those moments; and it will make any book, which you shall read in that manner, very present in your mind.
Whether toilet, bed, bath, or beach, the reading that lodges most vividly in our memory is often what’s done far from any bookshelf.
Nothing more superficial than a book about bookshelves. “Due attention to the inside of books, and due contempt for the outside,” Lord Chesterfield pronounced in 1749, “is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books.” A century later, an evangelical magazine contrasted the good child who “puts books into his head” with the lazy child whose books are “only on your shelves.” Because books can be owned without being read and read without being owned, bookshelves reveal at once our most private selves and our most public personae. They can serve as a utilitarian tool or a theatrical prop. Gazing at the bookshelves of a novelist whose writings lie dog-eared on my own bookcase, I feel as lucky as a restaurant-goer granted a peek at the chef’s refrigerator. The Duke of Devonshire’s library, in contrast, bore more resemblance to a Viking range littered with takeout cartons.
For centuries, portraitists posed sitters with a book; today, subway ads for ambulance chasers picture the lawyer against a backdrop of leather-bound law reviews. The Strand bookstore in New York sells books by the yard to set designers and interior decorators alike. The problem, as the Irish humorist Flann O’Brien explained in the 1940s, was that visitors taking a book down from the shelf might notice its suspiciously pristine condition. Enter O’Brien’s “bookhandling” service for clients who liked the look of leather bindings but lacked the time or ability to read their contents themselves. If you joined his book club, O’Brien explained, “we do the choosing for you, and, when you get the book, it is ready- rubbed, i.e., subjected free of charge to our expert handlers,” at a series of different price points:
Popular Handling—Each volume to be well and truly handled, four leaves in each to be dog-eared, and a tram ticket, cloak-room docket or other comparable article inserted in each as a forgotten book-mark.
Premier Handling—Each volume to be thoroughly handled, eight leaves in each to be dog-eared, a suitable passage in not less than 25 volumes to be underlined in red pencil, and a leaflet in French on the works of Victor Hugo to be inserted as a forgotten book-mark in each.
De Luxe Handling—Each volume to be mauled savagely, the spines of the smaller volumes to be damaged in a manner that will give the impression that they have been carried around in pockets, a passage in every volume to be underlined in red pencil with an exclamation or interrogation mark inserted in the margin opposite, an old Gate Theatre programme to be inserted in each volume as a forgotten bookmark (3 per cent dis-count if old Abbey programmes are accepted), not less than 30 volumes to be treated with old coffee, tea, porter or whiskey stains, and not less than five volumes to be inscribed with forged signatures of the authors.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Thomas Masson took the World War I era coinage “camouflage” as inspiration for his own 1923 neologism, “bookaflage.” Emily Post disapproved; her 1930 home decorating manual compared “filling your rooms with books you know you will never open” to “wearing a mask and a wig.” Against this chorus of condemnation, it’s refreshing to find Jonathan Lethem counter that although “people sometimes act as though owning books you haven’t read constitutes a charade or pretense, for me, there’s a lovely mystery and pregnancy about a book that hasn’t given itself over to you yet.” Yet, or never?
Like an exercise bike rusting in the basement, a book gathering dust testifies to good intentions. Ninty-two percent of American households contain a Bible; the average household, in fact, lays claim to three. Fewer than half of those respondents, however, can name the first book of the Old Testament. We shouldn’t take this gap as a sign of cultural decline. Two centuries ago, a magazine already joked that
some gentlemen of a Bible Association lately calling upon an old woman to see if she had a bible, were severely reproved by a spirited reply. “Do you think, gentlemen, that I am a heathen, that you should ask me such a question?” Then addressing a little girl, she said, “Run and fetch the bible out of my drawer, that I may show it to the gentlemen.” They declined giving her the trouble; but she insisted upon giving them ocular demonstration that she was no heathen. Accordingly the bible was brought, nicely covered; and on opening it, the old woman exclaimed, “Well, how glad I am that you have come; here are my spectacles that I have been looking for these three years, and didn’t know where to find ’em.”
We think of spectacles as a tool for reading books, but books can also be tools for storing spectacles.
Rebecca Goldstein reflects on “a time when we had some vases and candlesticks mixed in with the books, but I didn’t like that at all. It seemed to me to qualify as what philosophers call a ‘category mistake.’” Goldstein adds, “Kant tells us that a person can never be used as a means to an end, but must be viewed as an end in itself. This is one of the formulations of his famous categorical imperative. Well, that pretty much summarizes my attitude toward books. I would never use a book as a coaster or to prop up something else, any more than I’d use a person toward that end. Well, maybe a phone book, but not a book that was authored, into which some suffering writer—and all writers suffer—poured her heart and soul.”
Will bookaflage survive the digital age? Amazon’s release of the Kindle prompted the New York Times to predict that literary taste would go underground. No longer would strangers strike up conversations about the paperbacks poking out of their pockets, or deploy an author’s name as a pickup line. Quoting a radio host who remembers that “when I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person,” the article doesn’t acknowledge that in an age when films are streamed onto the viewer’s own laptop, Facebook allows us to scan our friends’ virtual bookshelves. More sinister, marketers continue to add to their toolbox for tracking the eyes and thumbs of online readers, since the number of click-throughs determines the value of advertising placement. The Kobo e-reader tracks the number of books and pages a user has read, even down to pages per minute and the times in which a user most frequently read.
In the same month, Vanity Fair asked us to “pity the culture snob, as Kindles, iPods, and flash drives swallow up the visible markers of superior taste and intelligence.” We needn’t worry. Social networking sites like Shelfari and LibraryThing allow us to pose and to pry as much as a piece of mahogany furniture ever did. When Jared Loughner went on a shooting spree in Arizona, his MySpace and YouTube pages were scanned for clues to his state of mind. It would be unfair to blame Loughner’s paranoia on his reading list, since plenty of other disaffected male teenagers (and what teenager isn’t disaffected?) have read or at least cited Animal Farm, Brave New World, Mein Kampf, and the Communist Manifesto. Less typical for his gender were the photographs of Loughner volunteering at a Tucson book festival, and the MySpace listing of “reading” as his favorite interest.
Far from making reader response invisible, then, the digital age may be taking us back to the Renaissance tradition of readers commenting in the margins of their friends’ or employers’ books and contributing homemade indexes to the flyleaves. Only after the rise of the nineteenth-century public library did such acts come to be seen as defacing, rather than enriching, the book. Today, “social bookmarking” tools like Delicious and Diigo once again allow readers to tag, index, and highlight books, in forms accessible (and answerable) to future readers. One journalist recently faulted the Kindle for lacking “the impressions of previous readers, the smudges and folds and scribbles and forgotten treasures tucked amid the pages.” Yet digital heatmaps convey the same information once suggested by wear and tear: if you annotate a passage on your Kindle, for example, a pop-up informs you how many other people have underlined it before.
We read over the shoulders of giants; books place us in dialogue not just with an author but with other readers. Six months from now, this book may be supplanted by a Facebook site. What seems unlikely to change is our curiosity about what friends and strangers read—or about what others will make of our own reading.