Books are currently on my mind. My own had once been carefully gathered in wall-to-wall-floor-to-ceiling bookcases, but the addition of some long-overdue home improvements saw them less carefully stacked precariously floor-to-mid-wall around every available floorspace of our small home. The arrival of new bookcases saw them regathered and stacked randomly in total disarray on every available floor, chair and table space in the living room. It took two full days to lovingly rehouse them.

Now they are back where they belong, in perfect order, authors together for binge-reading, friends next to friends, rivals kept apart, jockey autobiographies in chronological order from early Victorian to current, reference books in order of when printed, music books in order of genres and band members once again alongside each other. You get the picture – like most booklovers, I’m a might fussy and obsessive.

There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, a missing band member autobiography alerted me to what I imagined to be four or five missing books. Having tracked them down to a forgotten shelf in a wardrobe, I found that there were actually 20 or 30 books temporarily housed there during renovations and my work wasn’t as nearly finished as I’d thought. Had I opted for my non-reader husband’s “just stick them up there” approach, they might have languished in a wardrobe for months to come.

Hopefully everyone here in the Goodreads community will readily identify with the painstaking placement of books on a shelf, whether you be a genre, size or alphabetically-based arranger. And how many of you happen to have more than one copy of a single title?

It's easily done. My first copy of a Penguin paperback of Wuthering Heights eventually suffered a broken spine from over-reading and has been joined by a beautiful red leather hardback edition. They sit side-by-side, because how could I ever part with that much-loved and worn-out first copy?

Similarly, there are four copies, no less, of John Hislop’s The Brigadier. My first bargain-bucket paperback fell apart from over-reading. It was joined – not replaced, of course – by a hardback edition, whose cover disintegrated. I’ve been told by book collectors that’s a trait of the second edition. The cover was removed and placed lovingly within the pages, for preservation. Which is why there is a first edition covered copy alongside it. The family was later completed when a friend bequeathed a less-loved-and-read pristine paperback copy. A nice little nuclear group of Mummy, Daddy and two small “Brigadiers”; probably going a little bit too far when it comes to duplicate copies. If ever I run out of shelf space, the uncovered hardback might have to be rehomed.

We tend not to keep the less enjoyed books. When we have the misfortune to waste a few hours on a bad book, we can at least pinpoint the errors and avoid them in the future. That said, what is a bad book? It’s out there in the bookshop world and someone is enjoying it enough to see it published and sold. There is no such thing as a bad book; merely a book you did not enjoy.