A Photo With Something Behind It
Your bookshelf is a portrait of your mind. The books you kept, the ones you display, the ones you read, all of it says something true about who you are.Share on X
National Library Shelfie Day falls on the fourth Wednesday in January. The premise is simple and a little silly: photograph your bookshelf and share it online. A “shelfie,” like a selfie but for your books.
It’s a social-media holiday, and plenty of people will roll their eyes at it. I’m not one of them. A bookshelf tells the truth about a person: the books you bought, the ones you kept when you could have given them away, the ones on display where visitors will see them, the ones read until the spines cracked. I can learn more from five minutes with someone’s shelves than from an hour of small talk.
Most people never really look at their own shelves that way. Library Shelfie Day is a decent excuse to start.
I like any holiday that makes people stand in front of their books and think for a minute. Books get few enough celebrations that I’m not going to sneer at one built around a photograph.
What the Shelves Reveal
The gap between the books you display and the books you read is one of the more honest things you can learn about yourself. Look at both shelves.Share on X
An honest look at your shelves can tell you more than you might expect.
There’s the obvious layer: your interests, your taste, the subjects you keep returning to. But look closer and it gets more revealing. Which books did you buy meaning to read and never open? That gap between intention and action is worth noticing. Which books do you keep out where visitors see them, versus which ones you read in private? The difference between your display shelf and your real reading is one of the more honest things you can learn about yourself.
The unread pile is where I’d start, and I’d do it without guilt, since every reader has one. What bugs me is the display shelf stocked purely to impress, fat classics nobody cracked, lined up like trophies from a hunt that never happened.
We shape the version of ourselves we want others to see, and the bookshelf is where that shaping becomes visible.
For a writer, there’s an extra layer. The books on your shelves are your influences whether you chose them consciously or not. The writing you surround yourself with shapes the writing you produce. Look at your shelves and you’re looking at the inputs that feed your own work.
This matters to me more than the photo ever could. If your shelves are wall-to-wall one genre or one decade, your prose will sound like it, and you won’t hear it because you’ve never heard anything else. I’d push any writer to bring home a few books they’d never normally touch.
How do you spend Library Shelfie Day?
Take the photo if you want, it’s harmless fun. But do the more interesting thing too: study your shelves.
Pull a book you bought and never read, and either read it or admit you never will and pass it on.
Notice the gap between the books you show off and the books you love, and ask what that gap says. If you write, look hard at what you’ve surrounded yourself with. I’d take a sagging shelf of battered favorites over a color-coordinated wall of pristine spines any day, and I think most honest readers would agree with me.