In participation with Bibliklept’s project I’m displaying the various places in my home that books gather, by design or for convenience. Tonight I’m showing the second set of shelves that sit in front of my study desk.

Together with the shelf I displayed last week, this pair of shelves demonstrate mess entropy, expressed mathematically as dE=dM/t (“where E is the mess entropy, M is the actual amount of mess, and t is a given time interval”.) I’m not going to dwell on the top two shelves of CDs right now.

Here are the Art of the Novella series, subjects of Frances’s 2011 reading challenge, some collectible magazines I haven’t sold yet, a shelf of natural history books (including my much loved Roger Deakin titles) and a few oddities that don’t fit anywhere else.

Moving further down is my history section, though the term is used pretty loosely. I’ve culled so many history books over the years. It’s not a field I have much patience for, and tend to read deeply in bursts on certain themes, usually when a piece of fiction helps identify a period I know little about.

The bottom two shelves have little consistency: a rucksack of electronic odds-on-ends, a few remaining photography books (this section used to be three times the size) and those art books I am reading on and off at the moment (we’ll get to the art and photography monograph shelves in another post). The notables on these shelves are a couple of books of Sempé’s cartoons (which I love), the edition of Bodywatching I’ve had since a teenager and Julian Bells’ magisterial Mirror of the World: A New History of Art.