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ashley-mcgovern
9th February 2016

My Bookshelf

Ashley McGovern writes a piece inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Unpacking My Bookshelf’
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TLDR

In Tom Sharp’s Porterhouse Blue, the Dean of the trenchantly elitist Porterhouse College, Cambridge, is ranting against progressive reforms—one of which is a condom dispenser—in the library of his friend and old alumnus, Sir Cathcart D’Eath, when his host offers him a drink. D’Eath’s library turned out to be a fancy facade for his drink selection; he opens some volumes of Walter Scott’s novels for a scotch and, for the Dean’s pink gin, reaches across to his copy of Zola’s Nana. These two comical snobs epitomise more prejudices than a room full of Cecil Rhodes memorabilia, and the hollow, boozy bookcase forms the perfect backdrop to their reactionary views. Sharp’s setting showed how, for better or for worse, our bookcases were a trophy cabinet displaying our individual education and taste. Everything we were supposed to have studied, quoted, memorised, savaged, loathed or re-read was piled high or arranged neatly as a type of evidence of our student status. When unpacking his voluminous personal library from storage boxes, Walter Benjamin wrote how the original form of his collection was just three rows of books that—as a student—he regularly quoted from and used. Glancing across my own two cheap three-tiered plastic shelves, I can spot The Guardian’s Guide to Careers, scraps of draft essays, old college rulebooks and an annotated WJEC revision booklet resting unread on top of the crops of mandatory reading. The printed stuff of school days, the detritus of university life, job hunting literature and canonical books studied on my course all give some portrait of my education background.

Although these shelves are a record of my school years, perhaps my personality, I’ve taken no care to order the books sensibly and so I’m left with a unruly mess of classics and random buys. On each of the bottom shelves there is the unused flotsam of a tiny study: a group of empty picture frames, blank CD’s, a metal stein full of paperclips, brown “do not bend” envelopes containing something like Grade I Clarinet certificates and a scatty hoard of postcard reproductions of paintings in orange Nike shoe boxes.

Sitting tightly packed above all this are the normal shelves, two-books thick; themselves a jumble of pocket dictionaries, frayed secondhand novels, the odd imposing Longman Annotated English Poets edition, and overpriced museum guides. However, a little chaos is preferable to a neat, alphabetised library. The obvious benefit of random organisation is the comedy of contrasts that arises when widely different authors inhabit neighbouring spaces. Over time, I’ve placed Goethe’s Italian Journey next to I, Partridge: We need to talk about Alan; Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists huddles next to Woody Allen’s Collected Prose. One is an anthology of fairly short and rapt biographies of the classic Renaissance painters, sculptors and architects, whereas one of Allen’s short stories is about an academic biographer who publishes his major analysis of a famed playwright solely based on his extant laundry bills.

A recent oddball addition—courtesy of a coursework essay on alchemy in the Renaissance—provoked my first real thoughts about idea of an aura surrounding personal book stacks. Some scholars I was relying on for reprints of obscure images of alchemy, that rogue science of creating gold from base metals, often dropped hints to their genuine belief that finding the formula for the philosopher’s stone allowed access to the mysteries of the universe, centuries after the scientific revolution tried to cleanse the subject of its mysticism. For a month or so, my careless attitude towards shelving meant that they formed a tower of fascinating but crackpot texts on the top shelf. For that brief time, my messy cargo of required reading was shadowed by books full of secrets written by cryptic authors, books that seemed to need an old dusty library or the pedantic filing of a serious adept. The other day I returned the book of arcane engravings back to the library. It didn’t suit my shaky plastic shelves.


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