How embarrassed would you be to reveal the contents of your book shelves?

[Serial_Apologist]

This thread is prompted by how politicians and celebrities are choosing under lockdown to display themselves alongside objects clearly intended to indicate their level of sophistication or wisdom - especially those copious bookshelves before which they invariably choose to desport themselves, and which have prompted reporters and other celebs to comment on what they surely have to say about their owners self-image and tastes.

This is an opportunity to fess up to the existence of any literary - or musical, should you wish - items whose presence in your collection might give cause for embarrassment.

I will kick off with the small and by no means comprehensive collection of novels and works of philosophy by Colin Wilson which still adorn my shelves, fifty years after my having acquired them.

[gradus]

Because I find it almost impossible to get rid of books I have a motley selection on the shelves behind me as I write. Mind you the Observer's Book of Freshwater Fish and At Home with the Marguis de Sade next to Pepys Diary and Arthur Mee's Childrens Encyclopaedia, might strike some as an odd combination, but perhaps not embarrassing - I'm very bad at keeping books in a logical order.

[LeMartinPecheur]

Not I trust completely OT but I was amused years ago to find that furniture shops 'loaded' their bookshelves with fold-up cardboard crates pre-printed with tasteful(?) book spines.

For anyone requiring a more realistic, up-market way to fill empty shelves, may I commend the services offered in the columns in the Irish Times by Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O'Brien) entitled Buchhandlung, Book Handling, Dog Ears Four-a-penny, etc

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Myles-Harper-Perennial-Modern-Classics/dp/0007247184/ref=sr_1_1?crid=26NKH93VLZ4GA&dchild=1&keywords=flann+o+brien+.myles+na+gopaleen&qid=1589909655&s=books&sprefix=flann+o%27brien+myles%2Cstripbooks%2C139&sr=1-1

[Petrushka]

“A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him.” - Walter Mosley

Nothing embarrassing about mine, I hope. My main bookshelves have the music books on the left side and reference books and history (mostly Second World War) books to the right. Eyebrows might be raised at the very prominent spines of Ian Kershaw's two volume biography of Hitler, but no-one here will be likely to complain at Ernest Newman's multi volume Wagner biography or that of Henry Louis de la Grange's similarly exhaustive Mahler.

The reference books, the usual suspects, Brewer, Chamber's, complete Shakespeare, Oxford Quotations, Bible etc., are mostly redundant in the digital age but, even though most are falling apart after years of use, I nevertheless grimly hang on to them.

My fiction shelves are upstairs housing everything from Dickens to Andy McNab, Tolstoy to Le Carre, Peter Robinson to Kafka etc., etc.

More recent acquisitions are on the floor upstairs because there's no room for them on heaving shelves and I refuse to get rid of books I like. It's very much the same story with CDs really.

[Old Grumpy]

On HIGNFY the first week Paul Merton had shelves of videos behind him, perhaps to counterbalance Ian Hislop's bookshelves. Now we get the infamous curtains.