Anne and Gilbert's bookshelves

When Anne Blythe entertains her troubled and book-deprived new friend Leslie Moore, she invites her to borrow any book from their bookshelf any time. Anne and Gilbert have only recently set up house, and Anne explains, 'Our library isn't very extensive, but every book in it is a friend. We've picked our books up through the years here and there, never buying one until we've first read it and know that it belongs to the Race that knows Joseph.' (This conversation takes place in Anne's House of Dreams.)

Wow, that must be a great bookshelf indeed. Anne learned about the Race that knows Joseph a little earlier, from Captain Jim and Miss Cornelia Bryant. 'If a person sees eye to eye with you and has pretty much the same idea about things and the same taste in jokes, then he or she belongs to the Race that knows Joseph.' 

Their method of organising their shelf turns out to be similar to mine. No book is given place by size, age, thickness, genre or colour but simply by love. I can only hope the Blythes would find mine a good, congenial Joseph-Racy sort of shelf too. 

But I do wish we'd been given a list of those on Anne and Gilbert's, so that we may track them down if we wish. That's one shelf I'd dearly love to browse. However, perhaps Lucy Maud Montgomery left us enough leads so we needn't make random guesses. A careful read of the series reveals books sanctioned by either Anne, Gilbert or any of their kids. (Mostly Walter, since he was the budding poet.) I'm pretty sure that at least a section of Anne and Gilbert's bookshelves would contain the following.

1) Tennyson's Poems. Anne and her three best friends were clearly enthralled with the tale of the Lady of Shalott when they decided to re-enact it on Barry's Pond, and Gilbert saved Anne from near disaster.

2) Ben Hur. Anne was busted in class by Miss Stacy, sneakily reading this epic instead of studying. Anne reasons that she hadn't thought she was being very bad, since it's a good, religious story and no mere novel.

3) Pickwick Papers. Anne was treating herself to this tale of Dickens on the day of Gilbert's regretful first marriage proposal, which she refused. Anne's friend Phil Gordon remarked that reading Pickwick always makes her hungry, because it contains such delicious food descriptions. 

4) Martin Chuzzlewit. Anne assures Diana that she'll be a perfectly amiable guest whenever she comes to stay with her and Fred; just like Mark Tapley would be. 

5) Vanity Fair. When Anne is the principal teacher of Summerside High, the rebellious Jen Pringle reminds her very much of a young Becky Sharp.

6) Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Anne lends this to Jen Pringle once they became good friends. She treasures it not because she enjoys reading about martyrs, but because her beloved Mrs Allan gave it to her as a Sunday School prize. 

7) Homer's The Odyssey. Anne enthuses about Ulysses' adventures to Captain Jim, who relates to the mythical hero's adventurous spirit.

8) Natural Law in the Spiritual World. Whew, this complex text book about science and religion by Henry Drummond seems to be a pretty random choice, lent to Miss Cornelia by Gilbert. She returns it to him without making it all the way through, because she found it 'sort of heretical.' 

9) Lewis Carroll's Alice and Through the Looking Glass. Gilbert alludes to this when he tells his family. 'The walrus said, "It's time to get a dog.'" The announcement goes over well with all his kids, and Jem is especially delighted with the idea. 

10) Rudyard Kipling's Poems. LMM refers to these when Jem's first little dog, Gyp, passes away. She suggests that if Susan was familiar with Kipling's wise words about beloved dogs, she would say that a poet had said something sensible for once.

11) The Pied Piper. This folk tale by Robert Browning affects Walter enough to spur a stunning vision in Rainbow Valley which he never forgets, and later inspires his own celebrated War poem. 

12) Bishop Hatto by Robert Southey.

13) The Wandering Jew by Percy Byssche Shelley. (Both 12 and 13 were loved by Walter Blythe.)

14) Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poems. Even though young Mary Vance was in awe of Walter, she revelled in his book talk when the gang was all down in Rainbow Valley together. 

15) Marmion by Sir Walter Scott. Teenage Walter Blythe was secretly hard at work on an epic of his own resembling this masterpiece.

16) Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Walter was reading this classic when he decided to bestow the name on Ingleside's diabolical, two-faced cat, formerly known as Goldie.

17) Robinson Crusoe. Walter was reading it when Jem's beloved and devoted spotted dog joined the family, and suggested Dog Monday as a suitable name, because the pup joined the family on a Monday.

18) Baroness Nairne's Jacobite Songs. On the night of the lighthouse dance when war was declared between England and Germany, a devastated Walter briefly converses with a hyped-up Jem, who was whistling, 'Wi a hundred pipers an' a' and a' (I actually downloaded The Hundred Pipers on Spotify. It's quite a catchy marching tune.) 

19) Several gardening books. Gilbert suggested that if any book contained the word 'garden' in its title, Anne would be sucker for it. 

20) Gilbert's medical journals. Although he presumably had a separate shelf for these in his office, they round this list up to twenty.