Shelf Portrait (Number Four)

Most of my books are kept in my upstairs study/office which, of my few visitors, fewer still will see. There is one small bookcase in my lounge/dining room downstairs: for years I used it for cookbooks and a changing assortment of non-bibliomorphic items. Last year, however, I thought I’d make a semi-decorative feature of it by filling it with a selection of interesting-looking volumes (interesting to me, at least). The current contents of its top two levels can be seen above.

Its shelves have ended up in an odd configuration where two of them are rather close together, permitting space between them only for books no more than about 175mm / 6⅞" tall. As of last summer I had enough sufficiently diminutive volumes to fill only half of it, and there followed an exercise of gathering a variety of compact, presentable-looking books to fill the other half. The top shelf supports a selection of (mostly) non-fiction titles. The most recent addition to it is In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World by Simon Garfield, which I picked up from Stephen’s Bookshop in Monmouth on Saturday and then read that same day.