All the Books on One Shelf

Over the past 15 years, I’ve spent most of my time living and travelling in non-English-speaking countries. Although that makes it hard to buy books locally and leaves me too dependent on e-books, one advantage is that I get to see what it looks like when the English-language books in a bookshop get condensed to just one shelf display.

If you only had one shelf for all books ever printed in English, which books would you choose to sell? Here’s what my local bookshop in rural Serbia came up with:

Oddly, the children’s books are on the top shelf, while down on the bottom shelf where a curious little kid might be poking around, you get child-friendly offerings like Darwin’s Descent of Man and Clausewitz’s On War. Anyway, the children’s books seem pretty good to me: nothing very recent, but a good selection of classics, from Heidi to The Railway Children and from Treasure Island to Gulliver’s Travels.

The books for adults follow a similar pattern, with a heavy tilt towards classics. Shakespeare gets the most, with nine different books—and there’s a clear preference for comedies over tragedies and histories. No Macbeth, no Hamlet no King Lear, but Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale? Interesting.

Dickens gets seven, although his doorstoppers take up far more shelf space than Shakespeare’s slim volumes.

Next in line is Jane Austen, with five different books on the shelf, although again the choices are interesting. No Sense and Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice, but they do include Lady Susan and Love and Freindship.

After that, it’s a decent sprinkling of classic literature through the ages, from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius to To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. A lot of big names are present and correct, such as Melville, Defoe, Hardy, Wilde, Pope, Joyce, and P.T. Barnum. Yes, I suppose that last one is a bit of an outlier, but in general, I can’t argue with the selection.

One thing that’s missing is local literature in English translation. I often enjoy buying and reading local books, such as 912 Batu Road by Viji Krishnamoorthy in Malaysia and Norng Chan Phal: The Mystery of the Boy at S-21 in Cambodia.

Serbian literature in English translation is not on offer at this particular bookshop, simply because this area gets more or less no English-speaking visitors. The books here are being sold to local people who want to improve their English, so they wouldn’t be interested in reading books they could easily read in their own language. Bookshops in the capital, Belgrade, tend to have much better selections of Serbian literature in English.

Oddly, there are a few books on the shelf from other languages, though, such as Russian (Chekhov’s plays and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita), French (From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne), Japanese (Murakami’s Norwegian Wood) and German (the aforementioned Clausewitz).

It’s a shame that there aren’t many contemporary books on the shelf—the Murakami is the only one I can see that was published in the last 50 years, which almost makes me think that they ordered the Serbian edition and got sent the English one by mistake. I can see the logic of sticking with the classics to make things easier—the bulk of them seem to come from two publishers, Penguin Classics and Wordsworth Editions. But it does exclude a lot of fabulous contemporary writing from a much more diverse set of perspectives.

The Serbian-language books that take up the rest of the shop do include some more recent books by English-speaking writers such as Dzonatan Frenzen, Vudi Alen and even Kventin Tarantino.

The spelling alterations, by the way, come about because the Serbian language lacks certain letters like “Q” and “W”, and others are pronounced quite differently (e.g. “J” sounds like “Y”). Unlike in English, Serbian letters are always pronounced in the same way, so the English spellings would be horribly confusing.

By the way, I’ve been keeping things simple so far by talking about books in the Latin script, but Serbian mostly uses the Cyrillic alphabet. Bonus points for anyone who can identify this one:

Let me know in the comments if you can work out what it is. If everyone’s stumped, I’ll add a hint later. Also let me know what you think of the selection on the “Books in English” shelf. How would you approach the task of picking books to include on a single shelf display?

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.

Source: https://andrewblackman.net/2025/06/all-the-books-on-one-shelf/