I love books, the look of them, the smell of them, and sometimes even the contents. Over the years, I’ve hoarded a vast collection. I’ll admit, I haven’t read as many as I should have but I still enjoy being surrounded by them.
One of my greatest pleasures is watching my kids browse the bookshelf for something to read. My preteen has already read an eclectic mix of titles, from Peter Pan to The Greatest Trade Ever, just because they were easily available.
Recently though, I had to downsize. And since I refuse to get rid of any books, I was left with the challenge of fitting my collection onto a much smaller bookshelf. Spoiler alert: most of them ended up in piles on the floor, under the category of “tomorrows problem”.
And here is where I get on my soapbox.
When I am king of the world, one of my first decrees, after declaring a bank holiday on my birthday and introducing a four-day work week, will be this: All books must be published in one of 3 sizes, small, medium and large. By size, I mean height and width, thickness can vary as needed. Although succinctness goes a long way, there is no need to describe the color of a character’s eyes or the cloudiness of the day over multiple paragraphs to tell a story. But I digress.
On a bookshelf there are a few ways to arrange your books: by author, by genre or even color if you are going for the home working Zoom background aesthetic. But what no one considers is arranging by size.
If books came in just three standard sizes, we could finally arrange books in neat, perfectly optimized shelves. Picture it; shorter paperbacks at the top, a wider middle section for mid-sized books and taller shelves at the bottom for big hardbacks. Everything would line up beautifully.
Instead of what I currently have, a badly stacked game of bookshelf Tetris where my copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is fighting for its life, squeezed between a hardback and a mini dictionary. Every shelf visually uneven. Sigh.
I submit this to the house for approval, which I will of course disregard, because I am king.
