ABC snoops around Matthies’s bookshelves

You’ve been invited to dinner at someone’s home. Your host is busy in the kitchen and you wait in the living room. What do you do to pass the time? Admit it: you snoop around their bookshelves don’t you? We know you love shelf snooping just as much as we do, and now you can check out all sorts of bookshelves via the ABC blog. (Click on the top left corner of the pictures for a closer look)

Matthies just turned four years old. His mom works at The American Book Center Amsterdam, where she’s the children’s book buyer.

His bookshelves are cheap little ones that came from Lidl, bought when he was still a small baby and his books had already started to take over most of the house.

It was inevitable that he would love books, but he loves books and letters, reading, writing, and words to the exclusion of most other things, except maybe swimming. And visiting ABC Amsterdam, which he thinks is just an extension of his own bookshelves. Mom doesn’t know whether its’s his unusual intelligence or his autism that made him this way, or whether it’s the word nerd genes inherited from both his parents, but she figures that there are worse things your kid could be obsessed with.

Because of his autism, and his age, Matthies finds conversation difficult, and that makes him a tricky interviewee! So we asked him questions over the course of a few months and stitched them together to make one interview.

Wow, Matthies, you have a lot of books! How many do you think you have?

I think about a million.

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