By
Abbey Maxbauer
and
Rebecca Bates, Sweet
The woman with her books lined up by hue is exactly the woman I want to be. I want my copy of The Idiot right next to my copy of Sweetbitter, and as far away as possible from my copies of Modern Lovers and Atonement.
I want my bookshelf to look like a bridge of Pantone color chips—every
color represented, each situated adjacent to its closest cousin.
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Visual satisfaction aside, just think
about who the woman with shelves like this is. She doesn't stop at
color-coding her books. Her sink is always clear of dishes, her hair
washed daily, her bedroom floor unburdened of crumpled clothes. Sure,
there is always a little gap on the bookshelf from where her current
read has been removed, but she will replace it once she's done; she is
not an abandoner of books, nor a reader of many at once. She is focused.
'And if arranging bound piles of inky paper are my only attempt at
interior design, it is my responsibility to curate them to the best of
my ability.'
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might seem like a silly thing to fixate on, but books are my preferred
form of home decor. I would prefer a colorfully jacketed novel or memoir
over any vase or wall hanging. In bookstores, I'm a sucker for visual
intrigue (though I have found that beautifully rendered covers most
often accompany wonderfully written books.) And if arranging bound piles
of inky paper are my only attempt at interior design, it is my
responsibility to curate them to the best of my ability.
In
the spirit of transparency, you should know that I am not the woman
with the perfectly gradiated bookshelf yet. But when I become her, I
will be the best version of me.
If You Color-Coordinate Your Bookshelves, Are You Really Human?
My
prejudice against color-coding bookshelves and the fiends who code them
is founded on an elitism I make no effort to conceal. That doesn't mean
it's not real; I really don't like it.
That's a slippery slope of violent rhetoric, of course, but the fact
remains that the idea of thoughtful human beings spending hours
organizing their books by color makes me sad in the way that people who
say poetry is too hard to understand make me sad or the way that women
who use a flatiron on their hair until the ends shatter make me sad.
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Organizing books by the color of their spines is the decorating equivalent of posting "Omg, my heart is so
full right now" on Facebook. Both things are devoid of content. If you
say your "heart is so full right now," you aren't actually explaining
what happened that brought you to that overwhelming, ecstatic, and
terrifying space where the capacity for all feeling is present. You're
just deflecting real expression and intimacy. Likewise, arranging books
by spine color is an intellectual begging off. It's all surface, a
garish ROYGBIV veneer that suggests you have no stomach for complexity.
Someone who color-sorts their books would rather things just be cute, but has no idea what cute actually looks like.
A
somewhat related story and a cautionary tale: One summer night a couple
of friends and I were leaving a bad party when a handsome man on a
bicycle stopped in front of us, introduced himself as Miguel, told us he
was a street fashion photographer, and asked if we would come to his
apartment for a drink. We were 22 and wanted everything for free, so we
went with him. His apartment was small, but it had exposed brick and an
actual antique cast iron stove. Across the brick wall were a couple
hundred books sorted by color.
'Someone who covers up most of an exposed brick wall with a book
collection organized by color and then blames it on a possibly fictional
former lover—is that person not all deflection, all surface, all garish
veneer?'
This
was offensive to us on two levels. 1) We were graduate students in
literature and Miguel's book organization seemed insulting to the books
themselves. 2) Who puts a rainbow over a brick wall?
"My girlfriend did this," Miguel explained. "My ex-girlfriend."
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Miguel left the room for a minute, one of my friends said, "We have to
go." We bolted without saying anything to our host. I don't have any
striking conclusions to draw from this story, but someone who covers up
most of an exposed brick wall with a book collection organized by color
and then blames it on a possibly fictional former lover—is that person
not all deflection, all surface, all garish veneer?
I
recognize books are cultural props. J.Crew decorates stores with
recently released monographs, and I once found an out-of-print design
book at a Kate Spade store (though it was not for sale). They look nice,
and we all like to be around nice-looking things. But books are
supposed to be functional props.
'Yes, I want someone to evaluate the look of my shelves and think of
me as a person who's built an eclectic and diverse collection.
Example:
My personal bookshelves can no longer contain the number of books I
own. I once tried to organize my books by category: fiction, poetry,
critical theory, books that are more like art objects, monographs,
pop-feminist memoir—and the process fell apart. Most new acquisitions
are now just stuffed into the spaces between the top of properly
lined-up books and the bottom of the next shelf.
When
someone comes to my apartment for the first time, I assume they take
quick stock of my bookshelves and how they are or are not organized. I
do the same when I visit someone else. Yes, I want someone to evaluate
the look of my shelves and think of me as a coastal elite, as a person
who's built an eclectic and diverse collection, who starts reading a
book and then stops reading it and then starts it again a year later,
whose writing practice involves reaching for a couple of books to use as
references and then putting them away without thinking about where I've
just put them. But that's because I am that kind of a person. The
surface reflects what's really there.
