There are exactly 548 books on my shelves. I know this because I counted them. I counted them because it felt necessary to me to quantify my collection and in some ways better understand my persuasion towards the book.
Until recently, the book existed for me as a thing that simply was. It had no beginning or end or much history, if any at all. The book was something that was written, and then after it was written the book became something that was read. It was a way of seeing the book only for the words inscribed upon its pages and the thoughts that those inscriptions denoted. It was the book as content. This content was intertwined with the author and the author’s work, their word order and syntax and voice and style. Mine was a view of a “picture of the author as originator,” as Amaranth Borsuk puts it in The Book (61).
I believe that this is likely the most commonly held view of the book. The majority of readers and non-readers alike consider the book inextricably linked to the author—so-and-so wrote a book, I’m reading a book by, have you checked out ____’s new novel? They’re all phrases we’ve heard before and heard often, and for good reason. Often the prose is beautiful, or we are moved to tears or fits of rage by a plot. These are the things that have been created by the author and the things that stick with us after we are done reading the book. The issue here is that, for the person who owns the majority of the books they’ve read, the collector, they will spend far more time acquainting themselves with the exterior of their books than the contents therein, and the overwhelming majority of that time will be taken up by the passing observation of the arrayed spines of the codexes on the shelf.
I suppose then, that I should instead to a close observation of these spines. This is the only way to truly understand the breadth of a collection. You must run the tip of your finger along the spines and you will feel each movement forward and back like it is the beat of a pulse, what Jeremiah Brent describes as “an opportunity for people to look in and see where you’ve been and where you’re going” (McKeough). Let us see where I have been, where I might go.
A CLOSE READING OF MY OWN SHELVES
If we begin with own bookshelf, then we will find very quickly that these books are arranged in alphabetical order by author’s surname. A to Z, nothing fancy. What seemed to me at the time of its arrangement the most logical ordering of any book on any shelf if the collector were to go back and be hunting for a particular volume after they have shelved it. I understand this ordering now as a subconscious inability to detach the author from the book. In other words, the book was inseparable from its content, and as we follow the spines and the pattern of their forward and backward movement, there are certain deviations that can be found, breaks in the seeming randomness of book width, areas where one particular publisher or one particular author or one particular style of binding take over for a time.
The first impossible to ignore of these moments is in the middle so the Ds, where we find books by Anthony Doerr. There are two nearly identical first-edition copies of Cloud Cuckoo Land. All that separates them from one other is the knowledge that the author has signed his name on different pages in each copy. One was purchased new, as a thirty-dollar signed edition from Barnes and Noble the week of the book’s release. The other was found in a thrift shop in Ketchum, Idaho and purchased for four dollars years after it was published.
What truly makes a signed copy of a book special is that these are the only copies of the books that the author has actually written in. All the rest are just transcriptions of words originally handwritten or typed, pumped out in identical copies by the thousand. A signed book is a unique book. A signed book is a book that by its virtue of being signed cannot be separated from the author. It is the only book that an author has a tangible relationship with.
There are many signed editions in my collection. Some, that are very special to me, were books written and signed by my friends: Demree McGhee, Matty Matheson, Dan Melchior, Patti Callahan Henry. Some are writers whose work I have admired and sought out to sign my books: Seth Lerer, Lynne Thompson. Other books I have purchased because they are signed by authors who I consider central to the literary canon (and I have a faint hope will be worth a lot of money someday): Ocean Vuong, Louise Erdrich, and Doerr.
As we move our finger along there are other moments that should stand out to us, beginning just a couple shelves down past the Ds, if we are paying attention. There are areas where authors seem to have wrested control of entire lengths of self for themselves. There are three authors among the hundreds represented in this collection that have more than ten books to their name on these shelves: Ernest Hemingway, Brian Jacques, and Cormac McCarthy. Each of these authors enjoyed at least one period in my life in which it seemed as though I moved through a world colored by their prose.
Brian Jacques was the first. From the age of ten to fourteen or fifteen I read and collected 19 of his works. My bookmark from the sixth grade is still wedged inside a copy of Marlfox, one of Jacques’ many fantasy novels set in the Redwall universe. Most of his books are published by Ace Fantasy and are mass-market paperbacks, though there are some larger paperbacks and hardcovers in the mix. A typical Christmas morning as a child usually saw me unwrapping one of these books.
Then came Hemingway. It’s really hard to overstate his impact on me as a reader and a writer, and it’s easy to see as he’s got more books on these shelves than any other author at 21 copies. And if we are to believe that we can derive some knowledge of a person from the mere positioning of books on their shelves, then it will come as little surprise to know I have been an international volunteer in two wars, or that I will be living in Hemingway’s Idaho home as a writer-in-residence come April.
Last is McCarthy, with 10 books on the shelf. The real estate taken up by his books is not as expansive as Jacques or Hemingway, but his influence is easily seen in the prose I write. There is an affinity for the polysyndeton and for the description of landscape and for the American Southwest and I have once driven the whole south Texas map of No Country for Old Men and climbed around the gutters of Knoxville pretending to be Suttree.
There are other moments to notice as we move along these spines, but they are less prominent, they take closer observation, and they say things very quietly. There are a few books of poetry, 8 in total. I have never been drawn to the poem the same way I have been drawn to prose, but when poetry hits, it hits hard. These books are, more often than not, oddly shaped and leap forward from the usual range of depth of the spines. Layli Long-Soldier’s Whereas does this most noticeably, jutting out from a row of books otherwise mostly uniform.
There are damaged books too, here and there. Pieces that look like they have been saved from something. A copy of Felix Salten’s Bambi is missing the covering on its spine entirely. It looks like a sheaf of glued together pages on the shelf. Other books have frayed corners, torn dust jackets, water-damaged covers, but for the most part, the books in this collection are well taken care of.
Toward the end of the shelves we come to the reference books and collections. Best American Short Stories, copies of the Qur’an and the Bible, travel guides to Europe and the Florida Keys, and translation dictionaries that look like they were well-used for a season and then largely forgotten about.
Below the reference books there is a shelf of haphazardly leaning books that are out of alphabetical order with the rest of the shelves. None of them have been opened. They are the books that are (supposedly) soon to be read. The existence of this shelf creates a bit of a misconception, though. It seems to imply that all the rest of the books on these shelves have been read, and this just isn’t the case. A good number have, probably close to 75 percent, but this is a collection. This is not a track record of every book I have ever read, nor is probably anyone’s bookshelf. Mine is not well-curated. The spines are in many colors and some copies are worth money and some are worth nothing, but they all share the trait that I had some kind of passing interest in owning them, whether this is for aesthetic purposes, for the merits of their content, or for the novelty of the manner of their acquisition (where they were purchased/found, who they were given to me by, etc). There are many that I have not read in their entirety and do not ever intend to.
The next shelf down is a perfect example of this. Here we find photo books, coffee table books, and cookbooks: We Came from Fire, Lost in Appalachia, Great Art Explained. I open them often enough, but when I do it is to leaf through their pages to admire an image, maybe find and read one short passage if there is any text in the book at all. But these books were chosen for their aesthetic value, because I like to imagine I will one day have a home in which these will lie on a coffee table or in an area where guests will pass and they will pick up these books and leaf through them with scant commitment. They are meant to be seen and appreciated. And while they can be, and they are, owning them is very much not about reading.
There is a final shelf of books owned for these same purposes. This shelf sits high on the wall and is prominently centered. On it there are many leather-bound editions from the Easton Press, the Franklin Mint, and other publishers of collectible special editions. Of Mice and Men, The Hobbit, War and Peace, The Sound and the Fury—books considered classics of high enough stature to be reprinted on pages with their edges gilded and bound in leather. Their spines carry hallmarks that seem to harken back to an earlier day. Raised bands give texture to the spines and allow the words on them to be divided in a way that is pleasing to the eye. And while these are very well-made books, just like the photo books they are not meant to be read cover to cover. They are opened once in a great while and leafed through, maybe to find a stirring passage, maybe to look at the illustrations the publishers commissioned for them, but these books are owned largely for aesthetic purposes, and they look vintage, and the look old, and the look important, but in reality these are just mass-produced (albeit beautifully) collector’s items that carry little to no historical value, although they do look like it.
In a corner of this top shelf there are three more stacked books. They are rare first editions of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms. These are also meant to be seen more than they are meant to be read. I especially enjoy telling the story of finding that first edition copy of A Farewell to Arms, which was tucked away in a booth in an antique store, listed for twelve dollars. I bought it immediately. It is worth hundreds on the market (thousands if it had its dust jacket), but it is priceless to me for the manner of its acquisition.
There are many other first editions on these shelves. Things that either are now, or I hope in the future will be of historical value, and in some cases they function as an emergency parachute of a retirement plan if these authors should become collectible someday far into the future. Classics include The Things They Carried, Jarhead, and a first paperback edition of The Old Man and the Sea to go along with the edition of Life magazine Hemingway’s novella was first printed in. There are modern titles that I picked up with the hope that these may someday become a treasured possession: About Grace—Anthony Doerr’s first novel, James by Percival Everett, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Buckeye, The Passenger—McCarthy’s penultimate novel.
Where the leather-bound editions intend to impart the air of historicity, these books, often unassuming, or in the case of The Things They Carried, really ugly, actually, truly, are a part of literary history. If we based them solely on their content and their position as artifact this would be something to be admired in a collection, but they do not have the sophisticated, highly curated, historically emotional appeal of the leather-bound editions. The book, and by extension the bookshelf, is only what we see.
But there are other things on these shelves too. Things that are not books at all. A camel-bone-hilted dagger from an Omani souk, pewter statues of motorcycles, a shot glass from the Icelandic Phallological Museum with an artistic penis printed on its side, photographs from war zones, a manually-wound golden Jaeger-LeCoultre alarm clock, a wooden sign that says THE STODDARDS’ made by my father forty years ago, a slim stack of records, a trunk that holds even more keepsakes and mementos, a tisbeh, binoculars, piggy banks, framed postcards, and much more. All these things add to thw whole of the shelves. They function as one artistic unit, and the books on them are impossible to separate from the other objects they are displayed beside.
The bookshelf is not just a place for storage or organization. It is a collection. It is a display. It is an art piece.
In the same vein, the book is not simply a repository for information. It too is an art piece. It too is meant for display. The book is a thing to be collected.
THE BOOK AS COLLECTIBLE
In August of 2025, The Guardian published an article on the decline of reading for pleasure among Americans. In it, author Benjamin Lee cites data from a study conducted by researchers at the University of Florida and University College London that found a three percent annual decline from 2003 to 2023 in readers who read for pleasure outside of work, falling to a low of around 16% in 2023, with information gathered “from more than 236,000 Americans who participated in the American Time Use Survey.” The study analyzed readership beyond just the book, including audiobooks, print magazines, and other forms of reading material. This is something that has widely been lamented by pundits and scholars nearly everywhere, with many wondering if we were seeing the death of literacy, and by extension, the death of the book and print media. Those with a pulse from the turn of the millennium on can probably remember a time they heard the oft-repeated phrase “Print is dead.”
Of course, we know that it is not. As Jessica Pressman states in just the second paragraph of the introduction of her book Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age:
“In the twenty-first century, we no longer need books, physical codices, as reading devices. We have other means of reading, writing, communicating, and archiving. But that doesn’t mean some of us don’t want books. And that want manifests everywhere. Indeed, at the moment of the book’s foretold obsolescence because of digital technologies—around the turn of the millennium—we saw something surprising: the emergence of a creative movement invested in exploring and demonstrating love for the book as a symbol, art form, and artifact” (1).
And there is data to back this up. Publishers Weekly stated in 2022 that “unit sales of print books rose 8.9% in 2021 over 2020 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. Units sold were 825.7 million last year, up from 757.9 million in 2020. BookScan captures approximately 85% of all print sales. In 2020, unit sales were up 8.2% over 2019, which saw 693.7 million print units sold” (Milliot). Emily Temple, writing for Literary Hub in response to this data, asks, “So what’s going on here? Why are Americans buying more books, but actually reading fewer of them?” She and the team at Literary Hub had no compelling answers, but the evidence seems to point toward a rise in bookishness, or the value of being seen as a bookish person. From this, we can extrapolate that the book has become less about its content or the consumption of its knowledge, but rather about the act of collecting. Why else would someone buy something that is meant to be read and not read it? Because the purchase, in all probability, was meant for display.
There are probably a million Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok posts that proclaim the same thing: buying books and reading books are two separate hobbies. This is not due to some innately capitalistic American need to purchase, but from the more deeply human tendency to collect. We collect many things: some people collect mementos that remind us of a journey or accomplishment; some people collect coins and old currency; some people collect classic cars; some people collect taxidermy and human teeth; some people collect wristwatches and jewelry. In collecting, often things are first acquired for their beauty. They are admired and fondled and gushed over, but this is not what keeps them in a collection.
A person who buys a classic car but never drives it or works on it has no real connection with the vehicle other than an appreciation for its aesthetics. Likewise, if a man buys a wristwatch but never wears it, it is very easy for the collector to then sell the watch. What gives a collection value are the stories we are able to tell ourselves about the things in that collection. We imagine who might have handled that ancient drachmae and what it might have been used to purchase in its day. We imagine what that bobcat stuffed and sitting on a mantel might have done in its last days, or we recall the frigid morning of the hunt that brought down a sixteen-point buck. As Walter Benjamin says of his collection, “Once you have approached the mountains of cases in order to mine the books from them and bring them to the light of day—or rather—of night, what memories crowd in upon you!” (66). Without this connection, these items are just items, without a story, without a memory, they are soulless decoration.
So when we collect books, we are telling a story about ourselves. We are saying that we are well-read, knowledgeable, intelligent, that we are capable of great thinking or of appreciating the rhythms of the written word, that we are patient, that we can sit in idle contemplation divining things from the world and through the divinations of others.
And unlike many things we collect, the book is able to be displayed, en masse, to anyone who comes into our home. Collections of books are outwardly facing, while other things are inwardly facing. You would be hard pressed to find the space to display an entire collection of vintage vehicles, you would be foolish to display a collection of incredibly expensive watches and jewelry without a high-tech security system, and the same goes for the display of coins, and walking into a room full of dead animals is an experience that teeters on the edge of being rustically charming and macabre.
Unlike these other collectible mediums, books are relatively safe, cheap, easy to acquire. The bookshelves still allow us to show off in some ways, if we have rare or old books in our collections, and they give us the opportunity to show people what it is that we value without feeling like we may be over-exposing ourselves or becoming audacious. Nobody ever went into a room and said that the amount of books made them feel uneasy (probably). But I know many people who have gone into rooms of taxidermy and felt a little squeamish, plenty who saw mounds of gold and silver and were turned off by its garishness.
When we collect books, we are able to do so for appreciation of their aesthetics, history, or content, and each of these is equally as valid as the other. With the rise of the digital age and its various subscription services, we have fewer and fewer opportunities to own anything physical—to collect—especially if it is a form of entertainment. Books allow us to reclaim some of that agency we have lost. And even if we never read them, we are able to appreciate what they symbolize or how they look. We are able to collect them and form a story of ourselves around them.
ANALYSIS OF MY COLLECTION
On a randomly selected shelf in the J-L range of my own collection, there are 35 books, of these 35 I have read 29, and this trend holds through most of the shelves in my library. The catalyst for my collection and acquisition is most often because I want to read the book, to consume it for its content, to marvel at its prose or its plot. In acknowledging this, I must also acknowledge that this must skew the perception of my collection. It is a collection based almost entirely on the status of the author, and in appreciation of that status I am saying something about myself, that I am intelligent, that I enjoy high literature, that I am well-read.
But there are many books on these shelves that I will probably never read, never even open. The Malice of Fortune by Michael Ennis is one good example. I know nothing about the book or its author and I am certain I’ve never even opened it up, but the spine is interesting and I bought it at an estate sale for one dollar. Bullfinch’s Mythology and The Agony and the Ecstasy are another two I do not care to read, but I do want them to be on my shelf so that they can proclaim something about me and what I value, maybe that I care for the classics of antiquity and that I am appreciative of great art and story.
I also have to look at how I’ve chosen to display this collection. In organizing the books by the last names of their authors, I have subconsciously centered the author over the book itself, and if we evaluate the things that stood out in my earlier biography of my bookshelf, we must do it with this knowledge in mind. What would have leapt out at me in this close reading if these volumes were arranged by color? What about by subject matter? As this collection is set up now my central interests (aside from the words and value I place on certain authors) can only be gleaned from assessing the collection as a whole.
While I have always seemed to center the book’s content, I have not only ever collected books I intended to read. In Syria with the YPG, our unit collected any printed book in English or Kurdish, just for their virtue of being in languages we could all universally understand. The same was done with printed English books in Ukraine. I usually played a central role in the acquisition and collection of the books, but they were intended as a communal library for everyone, so I made no distinction other than their language. As a result, when it came time for me to find something to read, I often went to books I otherwise would not have looked twice at. Titles that come to mind are The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Shantaram. These were books collected for their language (content), but also for their mere existence, and so the subject matter they tackled was wide-ranging and eclectic.
My collection at home follows what is to me a very chronological progression. I know which books I have had since I was ten, which books I have had since I was twenty, and which ones I have had since I was thirty years old. They follow an arc as a reader and a writer. Though may have informed my writing, thee are certain books on the shelf that I have purchased only to get to know an agent’s interests, or to try to learn a new technique from the prose.
In all this, I am left with something to wonder. I appreciate the aesthetic of a bookshelf, of its many knickknacks, of this collection’s ease of reference granted by its organization, but I wonder what I might find different about my books if they were displayed differently. How might I refer to them in new ways? How might I even better appreciate the aesthetics if these shelves were set up to be maximally pleasing to the eye? If they were organized purely for aesthetic purposes or all bound in leather, what then would the collection’s appearance say to those who saw it? Different assumptions might be made of me, my persona as a collector may be less tied to my persona as a writer and a reader, even though for me, these are inextricable from one another.
I may never be able to truly separate the book from its content. It hits just too close to home. But I do feel that through my education and analysis of my shelves and others, I can appreciate the book for the things it is in addition to content. The book is a collection of words, of images, of thought. But the book is also another form of art too—one that is visual, like a great tile mosaic of sorts. The book is an object in and of itself. And that object is one that can be collected as any other, that can have its own narrative tied to it or fabricated from it, that can be obsessed over, that can be admired, fondled, fawned over. We can turn a page and appreciate the quality of its paper or the gilded edges or the leather binding or the dust jacket somehow fifty years old and still pristine or the history that comes attached to the book, how this book once changed the world, how reading it, or even owning it, changed yours in some small way too.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter “Unpacking My Library,” Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn. Schocken Books. 1931.
Borsuk, Amaranth, The Book. MIT Press, 2018.
Lee, Benjamin. “‘Deeply Concerning’: Reading for Fun in the US Has Fallen by 40%, New Study Says.” The Guardian, 20 Aug. 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/20/reading-for-pleasure-study
McKeough, Tim. “There’s an Art to Arranging a Bookshelf. Here’s How It’s Done.” The New York Times, 15 March, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/realestate/bookshelf-queer-eye.html
Milliot, Jim. “Print Books Had a Huge Sales Year in 2021.” Publishers Weekly, 6 Jan. 2022, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/88225-print-book-sales-rose-8-9-in-2021.html
Pressman, Jessica. Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age. Columbia University Press, 2020.
Temple, Emily. “Americans Are Buying More Books—but Reading Fewer of Them Than Ever. What Gives?” Literary Hub, 12 Jan. 2022, https://lithub.com/americans-are-buying-more-books-but-reading-fewer-of-them-than-ever-what-gives/