The filmmaker John Waters once said that if you go home with a date and discover that they don’t own any books, you should not sleep with them. Be that as it may, what’s on someone’s shelf can be just as concerning and/or peculiar as the total absence of books. A bookshelf, like a bank account or a diary, is very revealing. For your ease, a quick gloss at a few archetypal shelves you might encounter in apartments inhabited by people under 40 in New York.
A single man who works in finance, but “just for now,” will probably have a handsome yet simple bookshelf from Soho Home. It will be stocked with the novels every guy who identifies as an intellectual claims to have read, including David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Ben Lerner’s 10:04, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Don’t forget one book by a token female author, perhaps Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Instead of a traditional bookend, find a vintage cigar case to stop the books from toppling over.
