Books help tell the story of a home

Staging - preparing a house for sale by creating interior and exterior looks so compelling someone will be persuaded to buy it - is something I know a lot about.

Walls? White or off-white. Furniture? Clean lines, nothing too eccentric. Room decor? Only enough to emphasize the fine points of a space - don't block the fireplace. Family photos? Put 'em away.

Depersonalize, in other words.

But after 11 years as real estate editor, eight of which I spent editing the Friday Home & Design section, too, I also know a little bit about the opposite of staging:

Styling.

All those cozy rooms in home-decorating magazines? They've been styled - tweaked with pots of red geraniums and bowls of fresh fruit, plumped with throw pillows and plush throws, given intellectual heft with strategically placed piles of books.

Personalized, in other words.

Perhaps it's because I'm an editor at work that I feel no need to edit my home. Thus, personalized wins over depersonalized every time. I love the red geraniums that bloom in my dining room all winter long. I often mix green and red apples in a teal colander on my kitchen counter.

But books are, indeed, the styling style of choice in my design showplace. They're everywhere.

My favorite heirloom is a bookcase my grandfather, who crafted radio cabinets for RCA Victor in Camden, built for his family. It stood proudly at the bottom of the staircase in our Oxford Circle rowhouse when I grew up, and I was fascinated as a child by the treasures it held.

Charles Dickens. Mark Twain. Librettos of the "great operas." A set of encyclopedias. And those circa-1950s novels: Desiree, by Annemarie Selinko; Not as a Stranger, by Morton Thompson; A Woman Called Fancy, by Frank Yerby; The Silver Chalice, by Thomas B. Costain. I couldn't wait until I was old enough to read them.

When my parents redecorated in the late 1980s, my mother asked me if I wanted the bookcase. I did, but by then I had already accumulated enough volumes to stock an oversize bookmobile. So I agreed to take only the Dickens and Twain collections.

Along with those, the bookcase now has pride of place in my living room, filled with my own favorites: Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, John Fowles; detective works by Walter Mosley, James Lee Burke, Sara Paretsky, Carolyn Keene (my Nancy Drews), and tales by more than a few magical realists (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges). Arrayed atop the bookcase: more books (photography, history).

Another corner of the room features four separate stacks of art and interior-design books. Some eye candy, some brain treats, with some lovely potted plants on top.

Upstairs, my office offers quite the mashup: children's literature; gardening how-tos; vampire sagas; romance novels; some biographies; some short-story anthologies; some self-help for the still-aspiring novelist.

My English-teacher son's old bedroom? His tastes are as eclectic as my own, with Calvin and Hobbes sharing space with Kurt Vonnegut, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the ancient Greek philosophers. But his books are less artfully arranged, which is to say not arranged at all.

Obviously, if I ever get around to putting my house on the market, I'll have a bit of de-cluttering to do before I can start depersonalizing.

I suspect that staging, like grief, has more than a few stages. At first, I'll deny that prospective buyers won't consider my books proof that my house is too good a deal to pass up. Then, I'll be angry that a sale must take priority. And finally, I'll accept it.

Because by then, I'll be much too busy looking for packing boxes.