What your bookshelf reveals about your personality

  It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the eye is the window to the soul. But for me, it’s the bookshelf.

Forget the insides of pantries, shoe closets or the artworks adorning walls, if you really want to get to know someone, then take a good hard look at the selection of books on their shelves.

Do they have a curated collection of classics? Or a matching set of orange popular penguins? Perhaps it’s travel tomes that occupy pride of place?

But it’s not just about the selection – how a person’s books are displayed can be just as telling.

Is it any wonder then, that the internet was up in arms after lifestyle blogger Lauren Coleman committed the ultimate in bookshelf crime – displaying her books backwards! The controversial styling technique was denounced as “anti-book” and Coleman herself held up as an example of the shallowness of interior trends.

As the lifestyle editor of this very website, I’m not one to diss an interior trend. In fact, I’m quite partial to one. But a backwards bookshelf? What is the point of owning books in the first place?

And this brings me to something even more criminal, “shelf rigging”. Shelf rigging, according to The Telegraph, is the act of altering your shelves to reflect only your “finest” and most literary books; not, for example, the erotic thriller you read by the beach in Noosa.

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This type of rigging is not restricted to book choice, it also includes arrangement by colour or size or attractiveness – with everything that didn’t make the cut, chucked under the bed.

When I walk into someone’s home, one of the first places I wander over to is the bookshelf, and yes, I do judge. Not their books themselves per se, but the insidious crime of shelf curation.

There’s nothing more off-putting than perusing someone’s shelves, only to discover a collection novels by notable authors, all in pristine condition, all without a single sign of being read.

Photo: Instagram.com/dueshome

Where is the dog-eared favourite? Or the one that doesn’t fit the colour scheme? Or, god forbid, the trashy bestseller that no one admits to reading, but has very strong opinions on? (I’m looking at you Fifty Shades of Grey).

This kind of behaviour reveals something about a person – mostly that they don’t even like books, let alone actually read them. It’s a bookshelf with very little substance… perhaps just like its owner.

Shouldn’t our bookshelves be the last bastion of our guilty pleasures? An area of our home that we allow to truly reflect our tastes, however questionable they may be?

I’d much rather find a shelf filled with books that were loved (however, lowbrow the selection) than a collection that was chosen to impress.

If I see a shelf where the books are backwards, or curated to the nth degree, or show no signs of ever being read, I will be judging. Because that isn’t the shelf of someone who loves books, that’s the shelf of someone who sees them simply as decorative objects. And that is the only real bookshelf crime you can commit.

So go forth book lovers, display your Mills and Boon and Dan Brown novels with pride, because if nothing else, at least you actually read them.