Sebastian Shakespeare interviews Desmond Morris, the zoologist, ethologist and Surrealist painter. Morris is the author of The Naked Ape (1967) and The Human Zoo (1969), among many other books. He was born in 1928 and lives in Ireland.

Sebastian Shakespeare: You once had to buy the house next door in Oxford to accommodate your expanding book collection. How many books do you currently own?

Desmond Morris: It must be around five thousand. While I was living in Oxford, my library grew to fifteen thousand volumes, but when my wife died in 2018 and I left England to live in Ireland, next door to my family here, I had to part with about ten thousand of them. I sold all the ones on topics with which I was no longer actively involved. And I also sold all my valuable books, which is something I now regret.

How do you arrange them?

I arrange them by subject and then subdivide the subjects by author in alphabetical order. For example, my 986 books on modern art are arranged from Eileen Agar to Zao Wou-Ki, for the monographs, and the rest according to art movements. And I have a special