As with most of my articles so far, I am going to begin with a complete cliché: the books that we read (or if you’re a humanities student, the books that you read and actually enjoy) say a lot about who we are as people. In her book The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin explores this idea by describing her characters not by temperament or appearance, but chiefly in terms of what they read. But this idea is also something that’s translated into our everyday interactions. It’s not just literary commonplaces – we too assess people in terms of favourite TV shows and films, bands and sports teams. Elsewhere, the ‘About’ section on Facebook asks us for our favourite books. Shared pop-cultural preferences are conversational capital.

But now you can wear your favourite books, thanks to a flurry of dedicated literary merchandise companies set up – mostly online – over the past few years. To name a few, Lithograph Prints deal mostly in scarves and wraps printed minutely with text from your favourite book; T-shirts and even babygrows featuring covers of Watership Down, Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein can be found at the Literary Gift Company.

What is the attraction of all this? In a funny sort of way, it’s a very cathartic form of self-expression. One of my best friends bought me a tote that reads ‘I BLOODY LOVE BOOKS’; holding it feels like reclaiming the identity that Topshop and others ironically loaned to a whole generation of teenage girls with the ‘GEEK’ or ‘NERD’ T-shirts of a few years ago. It feels great. And maybe it’s unnecessary in a place like Cambridge, but wearing a T-shirt with the original cover of The Great Gatsby on it, or the words ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce’ is a very powerful way to defend a lifetime of bookwormery. Look, this book is stylish. Look, this sixteenth-century quotation is apt.

On the other hand, there’s something troublingly elitist about pairing fashion and literature to create a hybrid of self-expression. Because while it’s a whistle-stop guide to your literary preferences (and corresponding personality type?), that information becomes inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t know the book. Your gorgeous, simple, timeless Penguin Classics A Room of One’s Own tote bag is also a very loud political statement about your strident feminism, and about how some eternal modernist hipster part of you was pissing itself laughing on the HMS Dreadnought in 1910. See what I mean? It’s a code that some people just won’t be able to crack. Perhaps it’s because you need to be part of the in-club to wear them that they’ve become so desirable.

Of course it’s possible to dilute the effect. T-shirts can also sport benign, warm-feeling appeals to popularity: ‘I solemnly swear that I am up to no good’. Harry Potter may now rival Disney for the most common merchandise brand. But the problem with this is that what began as self-expression very quickly becomes a race to... genericness. ‘What are you really saying if you know the LeviOHsa / LevioSAH quote?’ I was forced to ask myself as my mouse hovered over the ‘Buy now’ button last week. It’s one of my favourite quotes, actually. But, vainly, I couldn’t shake the fear that I’d be taken for someone jumping the bandwagon, and ridiculed. Or worse, expelled.

But thinking about it, that may be true for almost all of the examples I’ve discussed. The Great Gatsby is, deservedly, loved by a great many people. But when there’s already someone at the faculty wearing that T-shirt, it might give you pause in a way that it wouldn’t any other item of clothing. Because that’s a preference they’ve already claimed. And there will be multiple different reasons why you each adore that book, but two identical T-shirts don’t allow for that sort of nuance.

Perhaps it boils down to whether you give a damn what people think. As Oscar Wilde says in An Ideal Husband, “Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.”

But my shopping trip ended when I came across a plain grey tee which simply said ‘THE BOOK WAS BETTER’ in cramped black text.

Yes. The book is always better