David Coggins looks at some famous bookshelves
A good bookshelf should be full. Or nearly full anyway. An empty bookshelf has so much more to offer the world. It sits like an empty closet, an empty museum, an empty stadium, unfulfilled, not reaching its potential. Trust our strength, the bookshelf begs us, let us show off, baby!
Empty bookshelves are unfamiliar to me. My issue is too many books. This leads to a lifetime of stacking, itself a dangerous path. When you admit that your reading ambitions require the air rights above every horizontal surface in your home—even the floor is in play—then you have a problem I can relate to.
A personal library announces many things. Some are general (“I like to read”), some are about taste (“These are the books I enjoy”), and some are about personality (“This is the way I arrange them”). This combination makes a library so revealing.
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