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 shelves belong to Nathan Maharaj, who is the director of merchandising at Kobo, but could just as easily be called the company’s chief bookseller. Maharaj lives with his partner Allie, their two small children, and a dog in Toronto’s East End. The books are spread all over the house, with shelves in every room.
When we moved in I didn’t take much time off work, so we were living in boxes for a bit and Allie wanted to get the books unpacked. She hates arranging them the way we had them in our last place, which was more library style—here’s post-colonial literature, here’s Canadian, here’s the business section. She didn’t want anything to do with that, but she wanted to unpack the books, so she asked if she could do it by colour and I said yes, because I knew I could find everything by colour still, having been a bookseller for however many years.
So you have a combination of the purples and browns and greens and then the kids stuff that’s totally overflowing, and that’s only half of it—the other half is downstairs getting read in some kind of rotation. We have no system for that, it’s whatever gets dragged out. We just lost a block from yellow because the kids just discovered the Curious George treasury. So now there’s a gap in the yellow section, which is deservedly so, because they should be reading them.
I had a couple copies of Ex Libris here and now I’m down to my last one. Great book about books, about life with books. You don’t start with this one, but when you get up to a few hundred volumes, this one has to show up. It kind of explains it all. There’s a chapter about people who leave books face down as bookmarks and how awful that is. It’s an essential part of the library.
Shelf Esteem runs every Tuesday.
