Archives of our desires

To own a certain book — one you had chosen yourself — was to define yourself.

Julian Barnes

Henry Hitchings expands on this idea in his introduction to Browse: The World in Bookshops, which I reviewed here two days ago. He calls choosing a book, not just to read but to own, "a small enlargement of one's self."

He continues, "Many of us cherish libraries, which are on the whole wonderfully democratic institutions and often the wellspring of ideas, but it is on our own bookshelves, packed with our purchases, that we find the archives of our desires, enthusiasms and madnesses."

Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean flirts with this thought in The Library Book. Speaking of her childhood in the Cleveland area, she writes, "We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family." In college, she says, "I turned into a ravenous buyer of books." Her expanding library gradually defined herself.

It could be argued that we are also defined by our library selections, except that this archive of desires, enthusiasms and madnesses is hidden away in library records. Our book purchases, on the other hand, rest on shelves visible to ourselves each day, and to any visitors who may happen by. What about non-readers? Their own "archives" may take the form of stacks of magazines, shelves of DVDs, a cellar full of wine bottles or whatever. To some extent, we are all defined by our possessions, including those who possess very little.

But our subject here is books and how those we choose for our own shelves serve as a kind of autobiography. The fact that I have both The Library Book and Browse, as well as such books as Time Was Soft There, The Library of Lost and Found and The Care and Feeding of an Independent Bookstore, on my own bookshelves certainly says something about me.

Another book I am currently reading, The Last Night at the Ritz by Elizabeth Savage, also touches on this subject. A woman is embarrassed by what the books her husband chooses to read say about him, and therefore about her: "The grandmother didn't like the way he bought Western novels when, if he had to read Western novels, he could have gotten them from the lending library." There, at least, the archive would be hidden.