This is a real bookshelf in a real bookstore in Holborn district of London. I was impressed by the range of titles: James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, Stief Larsson, John Fowles, Oscar Wilde, John Keats, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Geoffrey Chaucer (the latter five – on the bottom shelf), etc, etc. But little could be as grotesque as placing Fifty Shades Freed next to Joyce’s Ulysses, the former being criticised for the quality of prose, and the latter being praised for the exact same thing.
One may say that it is a strange sign of our times when novels, so different, can not only stand on the same shelf, but practically rub shoulders with one another.
