On Personal Libraries

June 19, 2022 timothywstanley@me.com

Now I use 'The Library of Babel' as a metaphor for the landscape of my own library. My books are not organized alphabetically, or, for the most part, by genre. The arrangement seems to have been made entirely at random, unless you know the quirk by which it was conceived. Books are placed next to one another for companionship, based on some kinship or shared sensibility that I believe ties them together... I marvel that the complexity of the human heart can be expressed in the arrangement of one’s books. Inside this paper universe, I find sense within confusion, calm within a storm, the soothing murmur of hundreds of books communing with their neighbors. Opening them reveals treasured passages gently underlined in pencil; running my hand over the Mylar-wrapped hardcovers reminds me of how precious they are. Not just the books themselves, but the ideas within, the recollections they evoke.

Leslie Kendal Dye, “The Organization of Your Bookshelves Tells Its Own Story,” https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/06/personal-library-book-organization-system/661326/. My library is mostly organized on affinities and historical relations. Kant lives next to Hegel and Kierkegaard, Derrida has a home above Heidegger. A collection of book historians live in the living room. Barth lines the top of a few shelves, which is a joke about critics who saw his project as a cathedral in the clouds.