Love me, love my bookshelf:
I will readily admit that one of the first things I do when going into someone else’s domicile is to cruise their bookcases. If I see Mickey Spillane and the leatherbound, autographed complete slipcovered set of the works of John Norman, I get a wholly different view than I would if I saw a set of Jemima Puddle-Duck novels and the Shaver Mysteries. ( The former was more my dad’s taste, and the latter more my mom’s.)
I’ve run into a few interesting notes on this end:
- Love me, love my bookshelf: Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”
- So what do you keep on your shelves, and why? “It is unacceptable to display any book in a public space of your home if you have not read it.”
- Artsy but unusable bookcase designs, and one that is mindbending and awesome.
- And the weird stuff we put into them, as blogged about by a guy in the web-to-print trade: They were very positive about all the books and seemed particularly keen on My Boyfriend Is A Twat and Confessions Of A Chatroom Freak, but perhaps that was because of the rude words involved (Chatroom Freak is full of them).
- Honest to god, those are real books.
- Really.