Nicole Junkerman on Building a Home Library That Travels

A library with a map

Most home libraries are arranged by accident, or at best by author and size. There is nothing wrong with that, but Nicole Junkerman keeps shelves a different way, organised by place, so that the library itself becomes an atlas you can walk along. The personal library is one of the oldest and most pleasing of domestic institutions, a tradition the books pages of The Guardian return to again and again. This entry is the practical heart of the whole project: how to build a home library that behaves like a map, one you can read, pack, lend and grow for the rest of your life.

It is the companion to the guide on building a reading list around a place. That entry shows how to choose the books for a single place. This one shows how to live with them once you have, turning a wall of titles into a working geography. Done well, the result is a room you can travel through, where every shelf is a different part of the world.

Arrange the shelves by place

The first and biggest move is to shelve by place rather than by author. Group the books about each city, region or country together, so that standing before the shelves is like standing before a map. The Paris books sit together, the Japan books together, the books of the far north together. Suddenly the library has a geography, and finding a book becomes a small act of travel. Nicole Junkerman finds this arrangement turns browsing into wandering, which is exactly the point.

You can order the places however suits you: by continent, by how close they are to home, or simply by which you love most. There is no wrong scheme, only the one that makes the map feel alive to you. If you want a steady framework to hang it on, the way a reference like the Dewey Decimal system gives libraries a shared order, you can borrow its logic loosely. But a home library should please its owner first, and a personal map beats a perfect system every time.

Let each shelf tell a place

Once the books are grouped by place, each shelf starts to tell a story. A well-built place-shelf, as the reading-list guide describes, holds an anchor book, a book that maps the streets, a history, some poetry and a wild card. Lined up together they describe their place from several directions at once. Nicole Junkerman likes to stand back and read the shelves as a whole, seeing at a glance how richly each part of the world is mapped and where the quiet gaps still are.

Keep the notes with the books

A travelling library is not only books but the notes you make about them, and the two belong together. Keep a record of the lines that caught you, the place and the weather you read each book in. Tuck these notes among the relevant shelves, or keep a notebook that runs in parallel with the library. Months or years later they let you reopen a whole reading instantly, the way a caption brings an old photograph back to life. The note is small but it is what keeps the map warm.

This habit matters most for the books you read in their places. The memory of reading a novel in the very city it describes is precious, and a note preserves it. As the reflection on why place makes a book stay explains, setting anchors memory powerfully, and a few words written at the time can fix that anchor for good. Without the note the reading fades; with it, the place stays available to you for years.

A library you can pack

The phrase a home library that travels has a second meaning, because a place-organised library is wonderfully easy to pack. When you plan a trip, you simply go to the relevant shelf and there, gathered already, is your reading for the journey. No hunting through the whole collection. The books for a place live together, ready to come with you. Nicole Junkerman treats packing for a trip and pulling its shelf as nearly the same happy task.

It works in the other direction too. Return from a journey with new books and you know exactly where they belong, slotting them in beside the others from that place and watching the shelf grow richer. The library becomes a living record of your travels, on the page and on foot at once. Each trip leaves the map a little fuller, and the shelves quietly chart a life of reading and going.

Let the library grow and breathe

A travelling library is never finished, and that is its charm. New places join the map, existing shelves deepen, and the whole thing slowly expands to match your widening curiosity. Resist the urge to make it perfect or complete. A library, like an atlas, is most alive when it is still being drawn, with bright dense regions and quiet spaces waiting to be filled. The gaps are not failures; they are invitations.

Lend from it generously, too. A book passed to a friend, with a word about why it belongs to its place, adds a road to their map without taking one from yours. This is the spirit in which Nicole Junkerman keeps the whole atlas in public, the conviction set out in mapping the world through books that a reading map grows brighter the more it is shared. A home library is a private pleasure that becomes a greater one the moment you open it to others.

A room you can travel through

Build a library this way and you end up with something rare: a room you can travel through. On a grey afternoon you can walk along the shelves and choose a country, pull down its books and be there for an hour. The library stops being storage and becomes a doorway to everywhere you have read and hope to read. It is the personal atlas of reading made physical, a map you can run your hand along, and it waits for you whenever you want to go somewhere.

That is the quiet ambition behind these shelves. Not the most books, not a perfect system, but a home library that is also a map of the world and a record of a reading life, easy to pack, generous to lend and always growing. Keep one and you will never be without somewhere to go, even on the days you cannot leave the room.

So rearrange a shelf this weekend. Gather the books of one place together, line up the anchor and the map and the poetry and the wild card, tuck in a note or two, and stand back to read the shelf as a whole. Do it place by place and, over time, your home library will become exactly what Nicole Junkerman believes a library should be: a working, travelling, ever-growing atlas of everywhere you love to read.