Being confined to your home for long periods can lead to an unhealthy preoccupation with things that really don’t matter very much and it seems that the humble bookshelf is enjoying its moment in the sun. As we gaze at an ever-changing cast of talking heads broadcasting from their homes, what we’re really doing is craning our necks to see what’s going on behind them. My ears might be listening, but my eyes are busily searching to see what colour their walls are, if they have any art and, if they’re sitting in front of a bookshelf, which books they have and how they’re organised. It seems you can tell a lot about people from the state of their bookshelves.
Simon Schama has reassuringly messy, overflowing shelves. They’re full of learned books that have doubtless been consulted often over the years. In short, it looks just the way you think an academic’s study should. Rishi Sunak, however, sits immaculate in front of immaculate shelves. They might even be organised according to the Dewey Decimal System, but it’s hard to tell. He looks as though he has full control of his reading material and his life in general. Which brings me to the state of my own bookshelves and what they might reveal about me.
I have to confess that they’re much more Rishi Sunak than Simon Schama. Not only are my books lined up on neatly painted white shelves, they’re organised by genre and alphabetically by author. Not for me books grouped together into a sympathetic colour palette, shading artistically from light to dark, and definitely not arranged by size, as an overzealous cleaner did when replacing the books after a deep clean of the Newmarket Library in Suffolk. Bearing in mind that I don’t have the excuse of being the Chancellor of the Exchequer, I’m starting to wonder if my bookshelves are revealing far more about me than I’d like.
So I searched for a list of the 10 most common personality disorders (did I mention that I had a lot of time on my hands?) and applied my completely uninformed mind to which ones might fit. I did my best, but the only one that seemed at all applicable was obsessive-compulsive disorder. I was hoping for something a bit more, well, exotic. Histrionic personality disorder sounds quite dashing until you read further and realise that it doesn’t involve dressing up like Hugh Laurie as the Prince Regent in the Blackadder programmes, but that those suffering from it are desperate for approval and need to be the centre of attention. Although I suppose that might involve dressing up like the Prince Regent. The description of a narcissistic personality sounded so much like a world leader whose name will not be typed here that I had to stop reading. Disappointingly, nothing to do with daffodils at all.
So where does that leave me and my bookshelves? Probably without any discernible personality disorder, but definitely the sort of person who can lay her hand on any book in a minute. Maybe I should offer my services to the Newmarket Library – I think they need me.