Shelfies!

I'ma gonna necro this thread a bit just to show off my shelves. Thankfully the main set of these were part of the house when I got it so I didn't need to pay for them, but they did greatly help influence my decision to buy. Most of what you see is manga, the US novels are off to the lower right shelves, as well as the non-built in ones.

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(sorry for the photobucket links, we've apparently hit the max upload for the forum here)

moimoi , is that the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar? Sounds like an awesome place (and a great book to have lying around the house).

Considering how proud I was to finally have my own bookshelves again a year and a half ago, I'm waaaaay overdue posting one of these. Maybe when I get home.

Okay, I'm home now. Though I only have two bookshelves now, I'm just pissing happy to have any. Sure enough, my non-fiction shelf's already starting to overflow:



A bar buddy of mine (who's since been making efforts to cut back; haven't seen him in a while) tried to palm off one of his bookcases during a move, and though I really wanted to help him out (and could certainly use one), it'd basically go where the laundry basket goes (to the viewer's left), and I can't have that.

Fiction:



There's another shelf below, presently hosting drama, poetry (including Empress Peach's published collection), and a few books on writing fiction. Haven't been doing any of the latter in months, so not a lot of use for those right now (and consequently a lot more room for future fiction purchases). Two of the overflow books pictured are volumes of the Penguin Classics translation of The Arabian Nights.

One of the things that always entertains me about bookshelves is the peculiarity of neighbors. Thomas Ligotti next to Clarice Lispector, say, or Desmond Seward's super old-school history of the Hundred Years' War next to Rebecca Solnit's collections of essays. Just thinking about it cheers me up.

Great places (the Freer/Sackler and AIC, mention eaten by the board); hoping to make it to Chicago at some point beyond a train layover, partly so I can bum around the AIC.

Thanks for the compliment!  I wish I had more art books, for my part, especially given how alarmingly my artistic interests are starting to turn towards the visual.

Here's a close-up for Judkins Moaner

Well, since most of my experiments in furniture-making involve bookcases, I feel obligated to contribute to this thread. After undergrad and moving a couple of times, I decided I wanted to try to build modular bookcases that could be converted into their own storage boxes, so that I wouldn't have to unload the books. These were my first attempt (ca. 2001):



The six units on the bottom are each individual boxes. The front facings that you see with the rope threaded through them are handles -- you pull on them and the rope extends out from underneath the wooden handle to about six inches so that you can carry the box in front of you with the front facing upwards. This works okay, but the six inches of rope actually make the boxes hang a bit too low, so that they bang on my knees as I try to carry them. Also, to feed the rope back into the sides of the case (the rope being relatively high friction and hard to push back through a hole) you have to slide out an interior panel and pull the rope back into the inner compartment in the sides of the box -- which means you have to take a few books out to be able to access the side panel on each side. So it doesn't save as much labor as it could. Also, the end-design of the boxes (as you can see) makes them quite large and deep, so they have a big footprint compared to more conventional shelves and don't hold as many books. Right now, they're holding part of my Classical/Medieval collection.

The thing on top is a CD case I made with similar principles, ca. 2002. There is a single frame, but you can slide each "shelf" out and it's a box, so you can carry the six boxes individually without having to unload the CDs, and then the frame is lightweight and easy to tote around (one of my main principles in this portable furniture project was to try to make it possible for me to move house with as few things that require two people to carry as possible. For many years right after college, a mattress and a heavy coffee table were the only things in my place that I couldn't carry by myself out to a truck if need be). This CD cabinet I'd actually rate as quite successful in design, and as you can see, I really ought to make a second one, since I've run out of space. This one has most of my pop/rock type music, and I've had to use other shelves elsewhere for nearly the same number of CDs in other genres (soundtracks, classical, jazz, celtic, modern instrumental, etc.).

This CD cabinet has one other feature that I'm rather proud of. It's meant to evoke a kind of backwoods folk shrine, and so it has two "stained glass" panels (actually Gallery Glass (tm), a squeeze-out paste that solidifies into a kind of rubbery plastic) on the sides that light up and feature my two musical patron saints, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits:



And then my last portable shelf experiment provides my main fiction bookshelves. These I made around 2003.



I wanted to decrease the footprint from the nautical-looking shelf-trunks and also make boxes that could close (the previous ones having to sit with their tops open to the air and getting dust and moving crap dropped into them onto the books. So these second-gen cases are hinged, so the two halves close together, and then there's a latch to lock them shut like a chest. In principle, this works pretty well and is much simpler than the rope handle business. In practice, these boxes are extremely heavy when full of books -- it's about as many books as you could fit in a typical file-box-sized moving box, plus the weight of the wood. They're also pretty large and bulky box shapes that aren't all that easy to get a grip on. What I did to mitigate this was put holes in the sides that I can insert removable metal handles into (these are actually the big u-shaped hooks you might hang a bike on off of pegboard). This helps, but moving these cases really is hard work, and I think in the end it's probably not any real improvement on just unloading the books into cardboard boxes and re-loading the shelves after the move. I save myself the un- and re-loading steps, but I'm probably destined to slip a disc at some point trying to lug these thirty yards to the back of a truck. They're also not child-safe at all. They are just stacked on top of each other, and though I've terraced them slightly so that they lean back against the back wall, if someone tried to climb on them, they could easily topple and do some serious damage. But I do like how they look (and I like how I can put them in a corner like this); I was originally planning on painting them, since they're just made out of cheap pine that's hardly worth staining, but I finished making them just a couple of days before another big move, and the my next apartment wasn't a great place to try to do painting. And now I've gotten used to the raw wood look and kind of like it.

Anyway, I'm opening my Etsy shop soon. If you want any of these made for yourself, they're cheap at one million dollars a set. (It's probably a sign that the other five bookcases I have in my house are store-bought.)

As much as I do love the look of a book-filled room, I am frankly totally ready to make almost all my future book purchases in electronic formats. I want to be able to move my entire library by just syncing a device to the cloud rather than moving 30-40 boxes of paper.

Jean-Luc Lemur I'm still pretty committed to CDs (though I'm buying much less music than I did in the past). Basically, the only think that will make me get a digital album instead of a CD is if the CD is twice the price (which is rare). Most MP3 albums are $9.99; most CDs are around $12. I'll pay the extra two or three bucks to have a copy that I don't have to be worried about any future DRM or access issues with and that I can rip at whatever quality level I want. That said, I now have many CDs that I probably have never actually played in a player -- they get ripped as soon as I get them and I listen to the music on my iPod. But I like having the option of playing them (and the physical backup). And I like album art and liner notes.

Nice shelf! Let's see... I haven't read Black Jacks in almost twenty years, but I remember enjoying it. I'm pretty sure I read Destiny Disrupted, but nothing really stuck in the mind if I did. Persian Fire I enjoyed, despite (because of?) its provenance of that sketchy rogue Holland. Guessing the NYRB title is Life and Fate? Been meaning to hit that one for a while; perhaps later this year.

Oh, and moimoi, one thing I really want to bone up on (again) is the history of comics and illustration. I love folks like Hogarth and Daumier, and may have another leaf through my late grandfather's copy of The Comics (by Coulton Waugh, a late 40s history of the medium up to that point). Right now, I'm guessing there's a lot of Garry Trudeau in my work, though a friend already thinks I have a pretty distinctive style.

I'm rebuilding my book collection after moving a bunch of times.  I realize the impracticality of tons of paper volumes, but more than anything, books say 'home'.  

Finally feel like they’re are full enough to warrant posting my Californian shelves/all-purpose media thingy:

Wowsers. That is indeed a library.

Edit: I just went back and saw Post-Lupin's shelves too. Dang.

Here's my bedroom shelves. I have other books other places, but this is book HQ.

I know this is a three year old comment, but what happened to the ant?

Noooo!!!!! I'm sorry, Lupin.

One in-one out is very difficult. I’m going to start probably—since my shelfie I’ve put stuff next to the wireless router taken to filling in more of the vertical gaps with short, horizontally-stacked books (damn you Penguin Montaigne). And I was just gifted a giant book on Futurism, so I’ll probably have to put that on the floor underneath the shelves…