Any person who owns several tens of
thousands of books is faced with an inescapable problem: their classification.
For if the comfortable chaos of a few hundred books does not prevent their
owner (and their owner alone!) from finding his or her way around them, the
ordering of ten or twenty thousand books requires one to have a retrieval
system. In fact, that is usually the drift of the second question invariably
put by the “innocent” visitor – the first one being: “And have you read them
all?” A “fellow conspirator” on the other hand, the moment I leave the room,
will look over the shelves, trying to work out the principle, and when I come
back in, will check—with not a little pride—whether his or her hypothesis is
correct. But even before that, comes the problem of their physical
accommodation. For books, unlike
foodstuffs or other articles, can’t just sit in cardboard boxes or live in
piles. These are no more than temporary solutions, which make it impossible to
use them. If they are going to be read, they have to be arranged on shelves in
a way that makes them retrievable. And bookshelves take up space, even if whole
rooms—not just their walls—can be devoted to them, as in university
libraries. The ideal, of course, would
be to have a purpose-built library, adapted to the books one owns, and
reflecting the image one has of it.
Quotation from: Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques
Bonnet Trans. Sian Reynolds. MacLehose Press,
London. 2008,
