The Nine Shelves, and What Belongs on Them
A library of 579 volumes needs somewhere to put each one. Here is what each of the nine shelves is for, what it deliberately excludes, and where the awkward cases went.
Any library of a few hundred books has to be arranged, and every arrangement is an argument. Ours has nine shelves. They are not genres in the bookshop sense — nobody reads by genre alone — but they are honest about what a reader is in the mood for, which is a different question.
Literary Classics — 170 volumes
The central shelf, and the largest: novels that hold a whole society in view and still follow one person through it. Provincial towns, boarding houses, inheritances, the slow discovery that a life is decided by things too small to notice at the time. If a book could sit on two shelves and one of them is this one, it goes here.
Adventure & the Sea — 148 volumes
Books written to be read at speed by people who would put them down if they slowed. Voyages, escapes, sieges, long odds. The sea gets its own place in the name because so much of the century's adventure happened on it, and because a shipboard novel has a particular shape: a fixed cast, no exits.
Mystery & Crime — 63 volumes
Not only detection. The shelf holds the older thing as well — the sensation novel, where the crime is domestic, the secret is a marriage, and the detective is whoever refuses to stop asking. Some of the best of these were written before anyone had decided what a detective story was.
Love & Society — 53 volumes
Marriage as an economic arrangement conducted in drawing rooms by people who cannot say so. The comedy and the cruelty of that are inseparable, which is why the shelf carries both.
Salon & Steppe — 49 volumes
The continental shelf: French and Russian writers in English. It is named for the two rooms those literatures argue in — the Paris salon and the Russian estate — and it is the shelf where a reader most needs to know they are reading a translator as well as an author. Every volume names its translator.
Gothic & Horror — 40 volumes
The frightening ones, and the ones that are worse for not being frightening in any way you can point to. Ruins, inheritances, doubles, houses that will not let anyone leave. The oldest strain in the collection and the one that has aged least.
Comedy & Satire — 31 volumes
Books meant to be funny, and books meant to draw blood, which historically are the same books. Nothing dates faster than a joke and nothing survives better than a good one, so this shelf is deliberately small.
Science Fiction — 19 volumes
From before it was called that. Voyages to other planets, machines that outrun their makers, futures imagined by people who had just watched the railway arrive. The shelf is short because the genre was young.
Essays & Criticism — 6 volumes
The shortest shelf, and the one that grows most slowly. Prose written to think in rather than to tell a story: a form that asks more of an edition, because there is no plot to carry a reader over a dull page.
The awkward cases
Every arrangement has books that resist it. A gothic novel that is also a satire; a sea story that is really a study of a marriage; a detective novel by a writer whose other eight volumes are on the literary shelf. The rule we settled on is simple and slightly unfair: a book goes where a reader looking for that kind of book would be pleased to find it, not where a cataloguer would file it.
Which means the shelves will not survive a pedant. They are meant to survive a reader on a Thursday evening who knows roughly what they are in the mood for and does not want to read a taxonomy first.