Sssshhhh…

The Guardian has a piece today on how to arrange your book collection. They're very scornful of my chosen method: alphabetical. Actually, mine's alphabetical for anything bought more than two years ago. They go from floor to ceiling on all four walls, including the 20,000+ vinyl records, but not the CDs, which are stored here and there. Everything else is piled in any space on top of properly shelved books. Then there are vertical columns of books behind the wardrobe, a 1m x 1m x 1m cube of unread books on the floor, then some piled randomly, then a stuffed bookcase at work and a few piles on my desk.

One of the wittily contentious things this article proposes is how to arrange your library to attract people.

The "I'm desperate for a shag', female version

Doesn't really require books – it's the last thing a man will notice. But on the off-chance you bring someone home who can read, it might be an idea temporarily to lose anything too intimidating by Andrea Dworkin.

Unless you're a lesbian, in which case you might like to put it on the coffee table.

Ladies: do not listen to this at all. Should I ever enter your house (that isn't entendre, by the way), I'll go straight for your bookshelves. I may well read a book or two right then and there. Or I'll leave in high dudgeon having seen Dan Brown, Coelho, or others of that ilk. Critical theory particularly appreciated.

What systems do you use? One or two of you, I know, will say that one's piled on top of the other one, but this is for the rest of you. Size? Genre? Degree of affection? Mark uses the Dewey Decimal system, which I respect. I'll use it when I finally get a place with enough room. I'd like a poetry corner, though that smacks of ghettoisation a little. A proper library in dark wood with a rolltop escritoire, ladders on runners, a wood fire, squashy armchairs and a card index. Someone snoozing in one corner as rain beats on the windows, a marmoset nibbling on a Jeffrey Archer in the other (my version of a shredder). A clock ticks, Radio 4 mumbles warmly from concealed speakers, a violin case sits on a side table and on another Marmite on crumpets await. I of course will be wearing a dark, three-piece tweed suit and a tie knitted by Anne Shirley, who's finally dumped that awful Gilbert cad (he turned out to have been a devotee of 'Hunnish practices').

Or, an ultra-modern German/Scandinavian-style glass and steel building, zero-carbon, naturally-ventilated, Passivhaus machine for reading in, perched on a cliff overlooking one of Norway's fjords.

Well, it beats Whitmore Reans: my place look's like Bernard's back room in Black Books, which is funny because he's right about everything as much as David Mitchell