I am most definitely one of those people who have to look at someone's bookshelves whenever given the opportunity. I also have a fascination with how other people store or organize their books and love to read about folks who keep books in the bathroom or in cases built under beds or out on sunporches (is this considered a guilty pleasure or not?).

Along this vein, recently The Guardian's Alex Clark had a book problem prompted by a household leak:

So now we're all together, a few thousand books and me, cowering in the only dry spot in the sitting room, waiting for the return of The Men, who first came a fortnight ago, but had to go out for something and got unavoidably detained. You can't see the telly, which the books are counting as a great victory for the life of the mind. There might be a nip in the air, but you can't think of turning on the heating now the Victorians have taken up residence on the radiators. Gradually, hierarchies are evolving. You can tell some of them are planning never to go back to the hall, not now they've seen the high life. Poetry has realised it got walked all over - literally - because it never really stood up for itself. Biography clearly thinks its natural chunkiness is going to count for something; when I point out that the best way to read it is not to come in until the second wife it just affects not to hear.

This article prompted Wit of the Staircase to come up with a funny Barbie picture (Wit has the coolest site ever!).

Ed comments that he has no book space (although he just keeps bringing more books home) and Jeff is under a " spousal mandate to figure out a better place to stack the new arrivals".

This whole literature thing sure can be troublesome can't it?

Jeff links to a Toronto Star excerpt of the new Alberto Manguel book (out in Canada), The Library at Night:

Yet one fearful characteristic of the physical world tempers any optimism that a reader may feel in any ordered library: the constraints of space. It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books. This is the paradox presented by every general library: that if, to a lesser or greater extent, it intends to accumulate and preserve as comprehensive as possible a record of the world, then ultimately its task must be redundant, since it can only be satisfied when the library's borders coincide with those of the world itself.

I will confess that I am wildly attracted to this book and after tracking it down at Random House Canada I'm even more excited.

The Library at Night begins with the design and construction of Alberto Manguel’s own library at his house in western France – a process that raises puzzling questions about his past and his reading habits, as well as broader ones about the nature of categories, catalogues, architecture and identity.

Exploring these themes with a deliberately unsystematic brilliance, Manguel takes us to the great Library at Alexandria, and Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library in Florence; we sit with Jorge Luis Borges in his office at the National Library in Argentina, travel with donkeys carrying books into the Colombian hinterland, and discover the Fihrist, a chaotic and delightful bibliographic record of medieval Arab knowledge. There seem to be no limits to Manguel’s learning, or his ability to illuminate his investigations with magical, telling details from the past.

My own personal library is really quite small - about 500 books or so. My husband has another 100 (or so) on robots and cars and engineering in his library and there are the little kid books - no reliable count on those. We don't have a space problem but I am constantly dealing with a sort problem with my bookshelves - some sections continue to expand and overflow thus causing everything else around it to be moved and refigured.

Quite frankly it's the kind of problem I love.

I really need to get Manguel's book though - it sounds too lovely to resist:

Thematically organized and beautifully illustrated, this book considers libraries as treasure troves and architectural spaces; it looks on them as autobiographies of their owners and as statements of national identity. It examines small personal libraries and libraries that started as philanthropic ventures, and analyzes the unending promise – and defects – of virtual ones. It compares different methods of categorization (and what they imply) and libraries that have built up by chance as opposed to by conscious direction. Although it is encyclopedic (and discusses encyclopedias assembled by Diderot and fifteenth-century Chinese scholars alike) and full of concrete historical analysis (including a brief investigation of the prejudices underlying the Dewey Decimal System) this book is animated throughout by a gentle, even playful sensibility: it is governed by the browser’s logic of association and pleasure, rather than the rigid lines of scholarly theory. After all, everything in a library is connected: "As the librarians of Alexandria perhaps discovered, any single literary moment necessarily implies all others."