Shelf Esteem is a weekly measure of the books on the shelves of writers, editors, and other word lovers, as told to Emily M. Keeler. This week’s shelf belongs Edward Keenan, eight time national magazine award nominee, lead columnist and senior editor for Toronto’s The Grid, and author of the forthcoming book Some Great Idea. Keenan shares his bookshelves with his wife, Rebecca, and their three children in their home in the Junction, in Toronto’s west end. The shelves are the clear focal point of the family dining room, and even the youngest, still toddling member of the family wanted to show off her favourite book—the ever classic Goodnight Moon—before wondering away to play elsewhere.
None of this is organized in anyway. Partly because we’re still in that stage of fixing the roof, and making sure the kitchen’s all good, more so than organizing any of the books. But at the same time, Rebecca has more of an impulse to organize than I do. I kind of like just finding things. I like that when I’m looking for something, I find a bunch of other things. It seems to me to be part of the charm of traditional libraries, that internet search capabilities kind of—with digital searching you definitely find what you are looking for, but you don’t have happy accidents as often.
There’s a lot of books that I own that I haven’t read. I used to live in a warehouse space, it was a sublet, and the person we were subletting it from couldn’t take all of his books with him to his new apartment. So we were like, custodians of a library of probably 30,000 books. Floor to ceiling bookshelves lined the whole entire place. People would always come in and say, “Have you read all these books?” And, so I would start telling people that I hadn’t read them all but that I loved living with them, and that I’d looked at a lot of them. The writer Brian Joseph Davis said that “Have you read all these?” is the kind of question that people who don’t read much ask, because people who read a lot know that with buying books your eyes might be bigger than your... eyes. In the sense that, it’s like, the things that I’d like to read, that I think it’s important to read, is a much longer list than I could ever get through. And then there’s always new stuff being added to it.
