Says Marie Kondo, quoted in "Marie Kondo Likes Book Covers That Feel 'Smooth and Silky'/'It’s all about the texture'..." (NYT).
I like the idea that part of what makes a book qualify for keeping in your collection is how it feels as an object.
November 28, 2025
"[T]he '30-book limit' is a mistake. This misunderstanding likely originated from my comment, where I mentioned that I personally was left with about 30 books..."
"... after tidying my own collection. This comment was exaggerated over time, and somehow turned into the idea that I had created a 'rule' limiting books to 30.... The main focus is always on choosing what sparks joy for you. Therefore, whether the result is 30 books or 100 books, it is fine.... I actually have more than 30 books on my shelves now, partly because I now have a larger bookshelf than I did back then...."
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41 comments:
People generally only buy a physical book to display as a symbol of status and tribal belonging.
They aren't really for actual reading anymore.
I don’t like to buy a book and give it space on my shelf unless it’s a book I’ll reference later or will read more than once. Any one-and-done book will be from the library.
Keeping a book due to its feel reminds me of Amy Sedaris’ organizational habit of grouping books by color. She has beautiful bookshelves, but I’d never be able to find anything.
My bookshelves make me feel unorganized. Like I have a dozen loose ends to tend to. I need to do something about it, but that would require getting rid of yet more books, or buying another book shelf which I do not want.
But I'm done giving away books. I've given away too many good ones over the years that, now that I'm older, I'd love to reread. I won't remember any of them now and it'd be like reading them anew.
I remember Kramer's book with folding legs, to turn into a coffee table.
I like the idea that part of what makes a book qualify for keeping in your collection is how it feels as an object.
I do not.
Keeping a book due to its feel reminds me of Amy Sedaris’ organizational habit of grouping books by color.
My daughter does this and it seems utterly bizarre to me. She is a serious and dedicated reader, though, and it seems to work for her.
People generally only buy a physical book to display as a symbol of status and tribal belonging.
They aren't really for actual reading anymore.
Speak for yourself, I read a couple of real books a month.
It's all about the feels.
Most of my reading of books today are on my iPad but I love being around books. My man cave has between 300 and 400 books. If I really enjoy a book read on my iPad I’ll look for a used copy of the book to go on my bookshelf. What Amazon gives they can take away.
Wow. I Feel the value of a particular book resides in the words.
So long as Marie Kondo drinks eight glasses of water a day it's all good.
Ah but what about Kindle books? I have 700 or so in my Cloud storage. And several hundred physical books on the bookshelves in my home. I do sometimes miss the physical book--where you can flip back and forth, or bookmark a page and return to it at some time in the future. Tough to do that with a Kindle book. But those Kindles do store in not much physical space.
“People generally only buy a physical book to display as a symbol of status and tribal belonging.
They aren't really for actual reading anymore.”
Utter nonsense. Some of my physical books have been read a dozen times and are like kinfolks. Some are stock for future reading. Reading prepping, if you like.
I do, however, limit myself to one large bookcase, so it’s one-in-one-out as far as physical books go. The old friends tend to dominate the shelves.
I do most of my reading online now. So much of my physical book collection is fragile paperbacks that don't bear much reading. It's true that a lot of the appeal of physical books is that they are the poor person's way of building up an art collection. There's a lot of charm in the covers, especially if they're illustrated, but not only then. The great days of paperback publishing in the Sixties were also a great era in cover design.
The one-in-one-out approach does have its problems, though. Yesterday, I bought a used paperback of Cooper’s Scenes From Metropolitan Life for the third time. According to Amazon, I last bought it in 2019 and, prior to that, in 2005. I like it enough to re-read it, but not enough to give it a permanent home in the bookcase.
Only 30 books is insane. A quick count of my sofa and coffee table yields 11. As for organization, I use 'Library Thing', which will provide Dewey numbers, as well as the university numbers. I worked through my books, entered it all in a spreadsheet, and now know what i have, and who may have borrowed.
Recently I have purchased (in pbk) and read two books by Peter Wilson (German Military History, Thirty Years War--long, academic, and fascinating to me); discovered another, more popular writer on Germanic/mitteleuropaische topics (Simon Winder's Germania) whose two other books (Danubia, and Lotharingia) I have marked (in pbk) for
purchase.
Reread two early Nabokovs (from public library), James Arnold's Crisis on the Danube, 1809 (public library), Ben MacIntyre's Operation Mincemeat (gets behind the myths surrounding The Man Who Never Was strategic deception in 1943--public library).
Almost done with Alan Riding's And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris--excellent!) and next up
Elyse Graham's Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of WWII (which, I regret to say, cites Ewan Montagu's unreliable account of Operation Mincemeat rather than MacIntyre's corrective).
God bless the Memphis Public Library.
I list all these here because so few of you will ever see my book collection or reading piles IRL.
30 books per shelf sounds about right.
Currently I only purchase books that aren't available for the Kindle reader or that are pleasurable to view or hold. Still have hundreds, maybe a thousand, of unread books bought pre-Kindle that I keep meaning to cull to this standard. I suspect my heirs will pay someone to take them all to the dump.
My daughter does this and it seems utterly bizarre to me. She is a serious and dedicated reader, though, and it seems to work for her
…by color seems silly but back when we were all shut ins there was a finance bookshelf that was nearly all red but the titles were relevant and carefully curated. I thought it was a remarkable feat. Respect…
I’ve seen one or two what were clearly organized with their aesthetics the priority, like a beautiful rock wall or something. I was impressed…
Then there's Marie Condom, who is often misinterpreted as saying you can only have 30 contraceptives in your house. CC, JSM
Preferably the 'smooth and silky' ones. CC, JSM
You wouldn't believe (IDK, maybe you would) how many times people will ask librarians to find a book they turned in and need again, but can only describe by size and color--things like author, title, and subject being so easily forgotten.
"I like the idea that part of what makes a book qualify for keeping in your collection is how it feels as an object."
I trust that part is miniscule, small enough to be not worth mentioning except on a very slow news day.
Don’t take advice from a woman who judges a book by the feel of its cover.
"I like the idea that part of what makes a book qualify for keeping in your collection is how it feels as an object."
Imagine our knowledge of classical Mediterranean culture if those Medieval monks kept only the manuscripts that felt smooth and silky.
"Don’t take advice from a woman who judges a book by the feel of its cover."
Even judging a Barbara Cartland trash novel by the cover artist's rendering of Fabio's pecs is infinitely more insightful.
Organizing by color will be helpful for some readers in finding the book later. If you have a very visual memory, you may remember the color of the book you're looking for. Some people may lock right onto the book once they're looking at the section of the shelf with the book. If that's not you, you may scoff and think it's putting "interior decoration" above meaning, but I think there's more to it.
>I like the idea that part of what makes a book qualify for keeping in your collection is how it feels as an object.<
I love the feel of books and don't readily recall a book that didn't feel good to me.
Well, I don't know, maybe one of those coffee table monstrosities. Or yeah, probably my 3K-page Internal Medicine textbook...
What I do know is that they feel a hell of a lot better than my Kindle - which has sat in a drawer since I bought it.
At one point, I had accumulated a couple hundred books.
Problem is, my occupation led to moving. A lot.
In 2015, with a move to Germany in the offing, and newly purchased iPad, I chucked the lot. Don't miss them a bit, and especially don't miss the unshelving, boxing, loading, unloading, unboxing and shelving.
I now have just over 260 books on my iPad (including the late Dr. Michael Kennedy's book). It weighs less than most books, and the lighting is always right.
Based upon someone's recommendation here a from a few months back, I just finished read Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park" in physical form, because that's what my daughter had.
Mari Kondo would very much have approved the quality.
And I very much approve of no bookshelves.
Suppose someone wanted change something in an ebook that people access through Amazon, could that be done? If so, is there a way (aside from comparing it to a hard copy) to tell a change was made?
When you buy a Kindle formatted book on Amazon, you are no longer buying the book. You’re “purchasing a content license and agreeing to Kindle’s Store Terms of Use”. Right under the buy button now.
By the way, if you like to listen to the Audible version of a book, it’s often cheaper to buy the kindle and add the audio book rather than just buying the audio book alone. I always check.
My wife is on a Kondo kick and it fucking pisses me off. She has a perfectly good Kitchenaid mixer with multiple attachments that cost me $300+ and now it doesn't "bring her joy" any more. On the rare occasions I cook, I go all out, and you damn betcha a Kitchenaid mixer brings me joy. So now it lives under the workbench in my garage in a plastic storage tub. Fuck Marie Kondo.
I had more than 30 books I wanted to keep in my collection before I turned 12. I still have most of them. Along with 2000 more. The only thing that saved me was Kindle. I have slowed down adding physical books to my collection to 25 or 30 per year. Either my daughters or grandchildren are going to wind up with a huge McKay's balance when I am gone.
In Praise of Bibliomania
https://lithub.com/nothing-better-than-a-whole-lot-of-books-in-praise-of-bibliomania/
That "brings me joy" stuff sure seems silly. My toilet plunger doesn't bring me joy but I'm not going to get rid of it anytime soon.
I am so glad to read that so many of you read books more than once. I thought there was something wrong with me.
After a lifetime of reading more books than 99 percent of my age cohort, I still feel ignorant.
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