Shelfies #50: Dan Berlinka

I’ve known this bookcase my whole life. It belonged to my parents, and my earliest memory of it is not as a place to keep books (though it was that too, of course) but as an improvised “divider” in their bedroom when we lived in Germany. I think the idea was to make the room seem more spacious. My favourite game aged three or four was to stand on one side, with my mother on the other, and throw my teddy bear back and forth.

The bookcase followed us back to the UK. During the move the bottom-middle support was sawn off to help the bookcase go round a tricky corner. Ever since it’s just been wedged back into place without ever being reattached.

This was my parents’ main fiction bookcase, everything meticulously alphabetised by author. In the mid 70s we lived in Suffolk; overnight guests were given my bedroom and I would sleep on a campbed in “the study”. Lying down I was exactly eyelevel with the “O” shelf. This is how I came to read Animal Farm, because it sounded like a book about, well… animals. (I was deep into my Dr. Dolittle phase at the time.)

The bookcase outlived my parents and now it is mine. I can see it as I type. The wood is solid. Constant. Some books have survived on those shelves since before I was born. There’s a 1960 first Penguin paperback of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and a Sherlock Holmes collection inscribed by my grandfather to my mother in 1953, “to begin her collection of intelligent ‘whodunnits’”. 

I re-organised the bookcase last year. I too alphabetise by author, but I have made some subdivisions by genre. It’s still mostly fiction though non-fiction creeps in on the lower shelves (with an overspill elsewhere). 

The reorganisation was a mixture of ordering and culling. I swore I would only keep books that were meaningful or that I intended to read one day. (The messy pile at the top is the “to read” pile, but I can see others I haven’t read yet within the main shelves too. I know there are some I will never get to but many that belonged to my parents cling on regardless.)

The books that jump out at me to highlight:

Idiots First – Bernard Malamud: on the cover an elderly man walks across a stretch of sidewalk suspended in the air. According to the dedication my mother wrote in it, she gave it to my father in 1975. His favourite story (and now mine) was “The Jewbird” – I think it expressed his own ambivalent relationship with his Jewishness, identifying both with the bird Mr. Schwartz, and with Cohen who despises him. The ending (like many Malamud stories) is devastating.

Danse Macabre – Stephen King: my brother used to pass all his horror paperbacks on to me. I suspect he didn’t realise this one was non-fiction when he bought it. I already loved horror, but this became my primary textbook. It has been my life’s work (ha!) to seek out all the books and films King recommended.

The Haunting Of Hill House and We Have Always Lived In The Castle – Shirley Jackson: Both of these are in King’s Danse Macabre list. My copy of The Haunting of Hill House was bought at an illegal street market in New York. It’s a gorgeously cheap paperback. We Have Always Lived In The Castle is a more respectable edition. It’s impossible to pick a favourite book, but if pushed I’d probably reach for this one. The title alone is beautiful and evocative.

The Street – Anne Petry: a recent read and almost a gender- (and coast-)flipped If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes. It’s written at the same time but, if anything, is even angrier. I got my copy from a box of free books someone left outside their house. (I love when people do that.) It’s published by Virago and those green covers always remind me of my mother.

The Netanyahus – Joshua Cohen: I bought this in a lovely indie bookshop near Goldsmith’s. It was an impulse buy based on the title and (forgive me for judging a book by its cover) the beautiful blue of the paperback. I wanted to include something from this century and this was an easy choice as it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Dan Berlinka is a TV writer and director, co-creator of The A List on Netflix and creator of Lagging on BBC iPlayer.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. Find more Shelfies on Instagram at @shelfiesplease.