Time up for books?

A Japanese “organising consultant” and author of the inexplicably planet-wide bestselling book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has whipped up some light relief for the chattering and twittering classes with her latest lesson on

de-cluttering.

Marie Kondo, creator of the KonMari method, advises her followers to chuck out as many books as they can possibly bear, applying her method’s principal idea, which is to keep only those that “spark joy”.

A home library of several hundred books might in this way be reduced ruthlessly to 30, thus liberating shelf space to be filled with a similarly slashed collection of joy-sparking holiday souvenirs… that lump of Connemara marble, the Chairman Mao bottle opener, and those plastic flamenco dolls. Burning books isn’t a good look, so an upside might be a surge in donations to schools, hospitals, and charity shops.

Ms Kondo seems to be subscribing to the notion that time is up for books as physical, real-world objects, now that encyclopaedias, dictionaries, histories, and novels can be downloaded and read on devices that neither clutter nor furnish rooms. But there is life yet in the ink-on-paper book, with sales in Europe and the US healthy last year.

They are not dependent on internet connections; have no batteries requiring recharging; can be given and kept as treasured gifts and, perhaps, Roman philosopher Marcus Cicero was right when he said a room without books is like a body without a soul.