Shelfish git

Do you like Lucy Mangan? I do. OK, she's the guardian of middlebrow children's fiction in one weekly column, Building a Library, but she's often convinced me to buy things. She also married a Tory, which is outreach therapy a step too far for me, but she gets good material out of it. Her wedding anniversary article this week was particularly entertaining. In it, she explains how they celebrate their anniversary by reorganising her books.

I'm about to build bookcases and reshelve everything. At the moment, everything's alphabetical, except for biographies: if the subject is more famous than the author, it's filed under the subject's name.

We work for a while in silence. Eventually the room is mazed with books. "It looks like postwar Europe," he says as we unpack the final box. "Borders mean nothing any more, and everyone is looking to a higher authority to help them out. So… what kind of system are you planning on? Simple alphabetical order? Chronological within alphabetical? Maybe a moderated form of Dewey Decimal? I do most of mine by publisher, but then the colophon was my only childhood friend."

"None of the above," I say. "It goes 'Fiction', 'Non-fiction'. Read and unread within each of those. Within each 'unread' there will be 'Really want to read', 'Quite want to read', 'Not quite sure why I bought this' and 'Accidentally bought this twice – this is the spare.' Then a shelf for 'Lovely books' – that's my Folio Societies and my Persephones and occasional other volumes whose beauty trumps their read/unread status. And here, maybe on a special shelf all of its own, I'm going to put Bridget. And call it social history. OK?"

He turns puce, purple and finally white. A strangulated noise of acquiescence emerges and he sets to work in silence. I think I might have broken his spirit. This may be the best anniversary present ever.

I'm toying with shelving by date of publication - which would give me a visual guide to literary history. Your thoughts, people?