November 2025: Show me your bookshelf, and I’ll tell you who you are

How are your books arranged in your home? Have you placed them in the order in which you acquired them, or maybe alphabetically, by language, or genre, or rather by size? Or perhaps according to colour, because you have a soft spot for visual aesthetics? Most probably, a mixture of several of these criteria were at work in your disposition of books in your personal bookshelf. If you are a bibliophile you might draw on established library classification systems, such as Dewey or the Library of Congress method. Or maybe you didn’t spend too many thoughts on where to put your books at all and are wondering why to bother about the placement of books.

Árni Magnússon and his assistant and collaborator Jón Ólafsson úr Grunnavík spent a long time thinking about how to arrange the large collection of books in Árni’s collection. Over a long period of more than thirty years, Árni collected and studied many contemporary library catalogues from major libraries all over Europe and took notes on the categories and the order that reigned these catalogues, before his books were finally placed in a definite order by Jón after his death in 1730. This catalogue is handed down in a number of copies, both autographs and later copies, and the Arnamagnæan archive is arranged according to this order up to the present day.

All of the catalogues that Árni studied, had one thing in common (unless they are ordered alphabetically, a new, but still rather uncommon method in the early modern period): They put the Bible and theological writings first, followed by juridical and medical writings, according to the canonical order of the faculties at the medieval and early-modern university. Following this order, the matter of the faculty of arts, that is historical and literary works, traditionally was catalogued last.

The catalogue of Árni Magnússon’s library follows this order – but only in the sections on printed books: The first items of printed books in folio, quarto and octavo format (shelved as 380 fol., 902 4to, and 208 8vo in e.g. the catalogue manuscript AM 456 fol.) are editions of the Bible or theological treatises. The manuscript sections of the catalogue however exhibit a diverging order: The catalogue begins with manuscripts in folio format, and the first large section of books is devoted to historical writings, Historici, on the different regions of the North, beginning with Denmark, followed by Juridici, again subdivided into sections on the different regions in the North, beginning with Denmark. The Bible in its Old Norse translation, Stjórn, is hidden in the middle of the Historici section, as items 225 to 229, in the middle of a collection of hagiographical texts, in a subsection entitled Sancti. The order in the other formats follows a slightly different logic, but theological writings never come first.

So did Árni and Jón get it all wrong? Or were they rebels opposing the established system? What does their bookshelf reveal about them? Putting historiography first in your library, and the Danish historiography up front, rather than the Bible, can be read as strong programmatic statement of the concept and aspiration of this collection: It is arranged as a collection of texts of Nordic origin, within the context and with the lead of the Danish realm, with a distinct focus on historical writings rather than theological or juridical ones. Theology is subsumed to history, as also apparent in the section of manuscripts in quarto format, in which the theological writings are labelled as “Sacra max. partem Historia” (AM 456 fol., f. 24v).

So yes, in a way, their bookshelves can be read as a deliberate rebellion against the leading position of theology in the libraries, and as a counter-staging of the primacy of (regional) historiography.

For more thoughts and analyses of the underlying concepts of this catalogue, follow the output of our research project on https://www.resonatingnetworks.com/.