Two bookcases. — titles catalogued from twenty photographs, deduplicated and verified spine by spine. What follows is what the collection knows about its collector — read it as a portrait, not a inventory.
Most "genre" charts count spines. This one defaults to page-volume — the real estate each subject occupies in your head. Watch the order change when you flip it: a handful of doorstop histories outweigh a whole shelf of slim business paperbacks.
If you sat down today and read the entire collection cover to cover — every page already on these shelves — how long is the road? Drag your pace. (Assumes ~290 words per page, continuous reading.)
Each mark is a book, placed by the year its ideas were first published — not when you bought it. The axis is deliberately broken: deep time on the left is compressed, the modern era on the right runs linear. The collection looks contemporary, but its roots run back nearly two thousand years.
Plot every book on one axis — from pure systems & quant at one end to pure narrative & humanities at the other. A generalist's library piles up in the middle. Yours doesn't. It's bimodal: two dense masses with a thin waist between them. You read like a builder and a humanist, and almost never a middlebrow.
Authors with the most shelf-presence. The repeat names are a tell: strategy & power (Greene), antifragility (Taleb), cold-war interiority (le Carré), the long arc of empire (Ferguson, Dalrymple), and the architects of far futures (Asimov, Robinson, Corey).