How many books is too many?

This many

My downstairs study. These shelves feature Books by Friends, poetry and plays, Random Big Books and Persephone. Also Action Man, a troll and Art Man.

I’ve got so many books. So so many. Too many. To the point where I think it’s becoming an issue.

There are books in every single room in this house. And the hall, a landing and a half landing.

The only zone in the whole house that has no books is the upper landing (but the slack is taken up there by two enormous boxes containing my years of press cuttings, which is a whole other topic…).

The scary thing is it’s only taken me seven years to get back up to this state, since we moved from our old house and I got rid of about a third of my books. The shelves were quite breezy for a while.

I seriously need to do that again, because it’s now at the point where I have so many it’s getting in the way of enjoying them. In the big bookcase in the small top bedroom, they are two deep. So knows what’s on the inner layer?

I realised the volume of volumes is becoming problematic again when I sat down here to write a Substack that started bubbling up earlier, then I couldn’t find the book I needed to quote in it.

This is particularly weird because it’s one of my very favourites, almost a fetish title, so I thought it would be in the Favourite Books area. It’s not.

So, then I had to look at every bookcase and pile in the house. Which takes quite a while and makes hoarding shame start to build.

The first two lots of shelves are in my spare room/fiction study. The second one in is double stacked. Unusually there are only two by my bed at the moment, but this is largely because they have been relocated to Floor Stacks on landings.

Although in the process of the hunt I did find the Ladybird Book of Clothes & Costume, which I couldn’t locate when I was writing my last post on here…

But I really want to write that other substack, so I think I’m going to have to buy that book again – which is clearly very stupid, because I know I already own it.

In order to shame myself into action, I am sharing with you snaps of every single book area – and without tidying up around them.

I have to do a cull, but it’s quite a process deciding what you can let go of – as I’m sure all my fellow book lovers on here (all of you, right?) will understand.

I can’t, for example, possibly part with any of the books that have shaped my life.

I will never read On The Road again – in case it’s as much of a disappointment as Wuthering Heights was for me as an adult – but I have to have it in my house.

It shaped me. Expanded my consciousness. Made me understand how big the world is and what angel-headed hipsters there are in it. It’s a touchstone.

Equally, I find it hard to let go of recently read and relished books.

I don’t think I’ll ever read that Emily Henry again, for eg, but I like being reminded how much I enjoyed it, plus I want to hold on to it for when just the right friend to give it to comes over. I don’t who that friend is yet, but I know she’s there.

Favourite books - and my books - in the hall. This is where the lost book should be, but isn’t.

Of course, I can’t give away books written and given to me by friends. That’s just rude. They have their own area and it makes me happy to have so many friends who are writers. It’s a nice thing to be reminded of.

So the sub section where I have to get busy is books that have been hanging around for a good while and have never quite been read.

Some have been started and then put down for some reason or another. Which means they have been read just far enough to take the gloss of starting a new book and you’ve lost the anticipation propulsion to start again.

Or the larger group that haven’t even been opened, because they just never seem like quite the right thing when I’m looking for something new to start.

Big art books and cook books (kitchen is just behind it) and special cook books which have to be close at all times, particularly Bill Granger's Bill's Basics.

There must be a finite time after which you must accept you’re never going to read those titles and they’re just cluttering the place up.

But then, just yesterday, in the spirit of not allowing myself to buy anything new until I’ve read a few more already in the building, I started reading a book from the hanging -around-for-quite-a-while category.

I’m absolutely loving it…

Which makes it all harder. Maybe I would actually love all the stale-with-familiarity books if I gave them a proper go? But I have to be strong. It’s no good having so many books you can’t find specific ones you actively want to refer to.

So I will have the cull. It just won’t be easy.

Have any of you pared down your shelves recently? I would love some tips.