Reorganizing the Library

For many years, I organized my books broadly by genre (the genres being typically fiction/literature, non-fiction, anthology, art, poetry, classics, drama, reference, travel, children's) and then alphabetically by author, and chronologically within a single author's work. I worked in a bookstore and a library when I was younger and this just seemed like the right -- the natural way. Fiction outstrips all the other genres in my library by an order of magnitude, so it's the only place the organizing principle matters much. In August of 2018, I undertook a radical reorganization of my fiction collection and put my books in order geographically (and then loosely chronologically, where there were enough books from one country for it to matter). I chose the geographic organization because I thought it would help me in my world books project. When I imagined it, I pictured my bookshelves being like a map. I put Canada on the top left and Australia on the bottom right, but with over- and under-representation, it didn't quite pan out how it was in my imagination. The UK took up more than a quarter of my shelf space and the U.S. almost as much. The entire continent of Africa and the whole of Latin America took up just 1/16 of the total shelf space each. The sheer size of the collections from the UK and US (and to a lesser extent France) gave them prominance of place, and it sometimes felt like regions that are marginalized geopolitically also became marginalized on my shelves -- especially Latin America, which was relegated to the darkest bottom corner of my bookcase. Perhaps I could have done some active work to move the margins to the center, but that would have been a difficult organizing principle to figure out. The flaws aside, I mostly liked the geographic organization. I found it made me think deliberately about diverse voices and representation when I was browsing for books to read.

But, this weekend, I had a little time on my hands and a little frantic energy to direct at an absurd project, so I decided to reorganize my fiction, again. I think a chronological concept had been floating around in my head for a while; I always imagined it as a chronology in order of publication date. But I hate separating an author's work (one reason the organizing by color principle has never appealed to me). Then I hit upon the idea of making it chronological by the authors' year of birth and it just seemed right.

Cervantes (b. 1547) is first, of course -- as he should be! (unless I were to pull my copy of the Odyssey from the classics section and give Homer pride of place) -- and by almost a century. After that comes Madame de Lafayette (b. 1634) -- her book, The Princess of Cleves, is the oldest novel I've read. Samuel Richardson (b. 1689) rounds out the 17th Century, but come 1700, there are a lot more authors and then things really pick up in 1802 (the year in which both Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo were born). Last, is Niviaq Korneliussen (b. in 1990) from Greenland. (Though actually I just packed up Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney (b. 1991) -- probably the youngest author I've read -- to send to to a friend, and I also read her book Normal People last fall, but gave it to another friend, so this represents just what I have at home.)

Because I am still also geographically focused, it's interesting to see when the first authors from different parts of the world start showing up. With Cervantes, Spain is first, but nothing else comes from Spain for nearly 3 centuries until Benito Pérez Galdós (b. 1843) turns up. For a long while it's all French, English, and later also Russian, with the occasional American thrown in. The first American is Edgar Allen Poe (b. 1809). The first Italian is Italo Svevo (b. 1861). The first non-American from the western hemisphere is the Mexican writer, Mariano Azuela (b. 1873). There's an interesting little spurt of Austrians (or subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) with the births of Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, and Ernst Weiss (born in 1880, 1881, and 1882, respectively). By continents, apart from Europe and North America, which are covered previously, the first South American author is Jorge Luis Borges, born in 1899. The first African author is Naguib Mahfouz (b. 1911) and the first sub-Saharan African authors are Cheikh Hamidou Kane and Camara Laye, both born in 1928. The first author from Asia is a bit complicated. I have a copy of the 1937 Azerbaijani novel, Ali and Nino, but the authorship of that book is disputed. I'm a bit surprised myself to find that the next Asian writer is the Sri Lankan/Canadian writer, Michael Ondaatje, (b. 1943). I've read a couple older authors from Asia, Kōbō Abe (b. 1924) being the first, if memory serves, but I no longer have the books.

What I like about reorganizing my books is that it gives me a new point of entry into my library. This organizing principle has me thinking about the connections between authors I hadn't previously thought of as connected. The shelf in the center of my 3 units right at eye level spans the birth years 1922 to 1926 and includes some incredible writers and personal favorites: José Saramago, Italo Calvino, James Baldwin, José Donoso, and John Berger all sit on this shelf. What a group! (It's not all men: Joan Aiken and Nadine Gordimer also live here.) Calvino and Baldwin must have lived in Paris at the same time, and Berger was also living in France, though in the countryside. In fact, Donoso was not too far away, in Spain, from 1967-1980. Meanwhile, though it's not so far from Spain to Portugal, I think Saramago was living in an entirely different world. And yet the ideological and political parallels between him and Berger and Calvino, at least, are strong. Another fascinating parallel among all five of these writers is that they spent a significant portion of their lives in self-imposed exile.

Another fun cluster of my favorites is a shelf a little lower on the left hand side, spanning 1951 to 1953. It begins with Javier Marías and ends with Roberto Bolaño and Hilary Mantel and Orhan Pamuk sit between them. I don't imagine quite the allegiance among these four that I saw in the group above, but when I think about their writing, maybe there is some shared sensibility that comes with the age?

I'll close with some other random observations:

• The first black writer is Alexandre Dumas (b. 1802); the second is Nella Larsen (b. 1891). What different worlds they inhabited and wrote about!
• The most well represented years are 1943, 1947, and 1955, with eight authors each. 
• If I had to name one thing that surprised me, it would be that Raymond Chandler was born in 1888. I would have guessed him a generation younger (i.e., in my grandparents' generation not my great-grandparents').