Books can reveal a lot about a person – including if you’ll like them | Books | Entertainment

Rather like Lindsay Bagshaw in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, I have always believed “books do furnish a room”. It doesn’t matter if they are stacked on a wonky IKEA shelf or exquisitely arranged in an ornately carved mahogany George III bookcase. Mine, some battered, some first editions, reflect the good, bad and downright dreadful of my life.

AA Milne’s When We Were Very Young stands next to Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, Fanny Hill’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure sits beside Chaucer’s A Parliament of Fowls. The books you were forced to read are displayed alongside those you blissfully read and re-read. Gifts from long ago exes, inscribed with lyrical tributes to my youthful charms are flanked by dreaded O-Level texts and novels so forgettable I can’t recall a single syllable.

Elizabeth David’s recipes, daubed with ancient blobs of gravy, lean on Larousse’s majestic Mythology. Yeats huddles with Proust who has – ever since I moved in 24 years ago and stuffed my ‘library’ into the previous incumbent’s shelves any old how, vowing to sort them into a sensible aesthetic arrangement when I had a minute – leaned comfortably against LM Montgomery’s mesmerising Anne of Green Gables.

I like to think anyone perusing my agglomeration of books would know instantly if we’d hit it off. I’ve certainly been guilty of leafing through a stranger’s tomes and deciding – purely because of their fondness for Saul Bellow or Barbara Cartland – that I love them to bits or have nothing whatsoever to say to them.

Why, you wonder, am I musing about life-long personal libraries? The estate of the late, beguiling Snowman creator Raymond Briggs has donated his thousand plus collection of treasured books to Oxfam. Fans have swooped in to marvel at the 30 comic annuals from the 1950s and works by Aubrey Beardsley, EH Shepard, Charles Schulz and Posy Simmonds thought to have helped shape Briggs’ own inimitable illustrative style.

I bet you’ve guessed where I am going with this. Of course, I am pondering whether to inflict the disposal of my piles of well-worn books on my children when I shuffle off this mortal coil, or whether to start weeding out the duds now?

The problem is that I’ve become somewhat wedded to my motley library. Each volume – I know this sounds stupidly sentimental – feels like a part of me. Yes, even the novels I’ve entirely forgotten.

On reflection, I can’t bear to part with any of them. Procrastination reigns.