Ben Schott shares the strange worlds created by Edward Gorey

There are certain writers, when you see them on a bookshelf, you know their owner will be a good egg, Schott tells Christine Manby

(Tom Ford)

Among the many joys of lockdown was finding how much we can tell – or should that be how much we think we can tell – about people from the contents of their bookshelves as seen in the background on Zoom calls. Remember Michael Gove’s bookcase, which notoriously featured a book by Holocaust denier David Irving and a copy of The Bell Curve, a controversial treatise which discusses purported connections between race and intelligence?

Writer and designer Ben Schott definitely believes that bookcases offer a window on the soul or at least a window on their owner’s sense of humour. “There are certain writers, when you see them on a bookshelf, you know their owner will be a good egg,” he says. Two of those writers are PG Wodehouse and Edward Gorey.

Schott himself is best known for his multi-million-selling Miscellanies, the books found in everyone’s Christmas stocking in the early noughties. These days he writes for Bloomberg Opinion and has recently published a second novel, Jeeves And The Leap Of Faith, a homage to PG Wodehouse with the blessing of the late writer’s estate. So it goes without saying that Schott much admires PG Wodehouse, but when it comes to indicating that a reader is truly “simpatico”, as Schott puts it, it’s perhaps Gorey that has the edge.