In the opening paragraphs of Donna Leon’s latest Guido Brunetti mystery, So Shall You Reap, her detective hero struggles with a predicament familiar to bibliophiles: how to manage an ever-growing book collection. In Brunetti’s case, “the cull” involves deciding which volumes to jettison so he can prevent his library overspilling the four crammed shelves allotted to him in his wife’s study.
There are books he wants to re-read. Those he wants to read for the first time. Others he has started but not yet finished. And books he knew, even when he bought them, he would never read. In short, the low-hanging fruit. Out goes Proust, followed by Herman Melville, Alessandro Manzoni and Gabriele D’Annunzio in “a series of visceral judgments” as Brunetti denies cast-outs a chance “to plead for their lives”.
Let’s be honest, haven’t we all been there? That mad moment when we abandon reason and sentiment and haul a bag of books down to the second-hand shop. Admittedly, some holdouts, perhaps blessed with unlimited space, never succumb to downsizing. “Every book I ever bought, I have,” David Bowie admitted. “I can’t throw it away. It’s physically impossible to leave my hand!”
Mind you, he had to stash the overflow in warehouses. Writing in the house-hunting expeditions that revealed a sinister paucity of bookshelves, bar the odd coffee table tome displayed strategically as aspirational objects to woo buyers, journalist and author Paul Daley deplored the tyranny of minimalism that “waged a war on bookshelves”. Unlike Brunetti, Daley has read Melville’s –twice –and while he snaps up three to four new books weekly, “far fewer leave”. Well, books do furnish a room.
