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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

The anal bookcase

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17:42 / 26.02.03

What's all this gubbins about having too many books in this thread? Shurely shome mishtake... I read something recently about a collector who had so many books he had to buy a new flat for them. Sounds ideal to me...

The Return Of Rothkoid

20:51 / 26.02.03

Grant's idea is probably closest to mine, actually. Apart from the "too many" bit. I may never finish them all, but goddamn it, I need them all. And MORE!

11:51 / 27.02.03

In my old place I had more (although still insufficient) shelf space (four bookcases plus miscellaneous extra wall shelving). For a good while the system was pretty much my optimum one: fiction stacked alphabetically (like to keep pulp sf and fantasy hunkered up close to more respected works in an ineffectual attempt to stave off intellectual snobbishness), all else by subject (reference texts, poetry, philosophy, history, science, religion, occult etc.).

Currently have much reduced book-space and now, ack, double-stack and, mnf, pile-up books. It burns, it burns.

But, of course, you can never have too many books. Think of all the books you don't have. Argh, my collection is stuffed full of absences. Must. Go. And. Spend money on more books. Right now. Eeee.

Brigade du jour

21:58 / 27.02.03

As I still am with my videos and CDs, with my books I used to be strictly alphabetical, then chronological. But I couldn't be arsed last time I moved, even though my new bedroom had eight, count 'em, EIGHT long beautiful blue shelves to pack stuff onto. Still not enough room, of course, such a hoarder am I. Anyway, back to the plot.

I now just stuff them in what I deem to be a fairly aesthetically pleasing arrangement, although if I have a number of books by the same author (and of a similar size and shape) I bung them together. Otherwise, anything goes. Comic books, though, they're a different matter ...

Old rules still apply with them, but I keep them in nice paper boxes I 'borrowed' from work. They're arranged by DC, then Marvel, then miscellaneous, because I don't have many comics from other publishers.

Jesus, that's comfortably the most boring reply I have ever posted. It's positively buckling under the qualitative weight of my other 370-odd replies. Even the fairly shit ones.

The Return Of Rothkoid

08:31 / 28.02.03

Well, living two minutes from one of the best second-hand bookshops in Sydney means that I've just come home with MORE book-stretching stuff. So the reshelving continues...

Oh - and are people anal about what sort of shelves they have? I have open-backed pine things and feel vaguely declasse for it. Hrm.

15:59 / 28.02.03

Good god, man, I feel lucky to have shelves at all.

Interesting point about the CDs - I'm much more concerned with keeping LPs and CDs in alphabetical order (within genre) than books. Possibly because books have bigger spines, and non-standardized sizes. Easier to locate just by glancing over a shelf.

Goodness Gracious Meme

16:26 / 28.02.03

word.

(on shelves - i have the cheapest chipboard shelves, originally 80s black now tarted up with turquoise and purple paint job. )

And am realising that compared to most of you lot, I probalby have hardly any books.

17:15 / 28.02.03

This thread and the thread on food both overwhelmed me so much that I couldn't even post on them.

However, I can handle a small comment on bookshelves. Open-backed pine shelves are number one! Building bookshelves is a little obsessive habit of mine. Most bookshelves that you buy from the store are too deep for books. I make mine with 8" or 10" board. The last one was a beaut, three small cases of 8" board held together with floating shelves for CDs.

Brigade du jour

18:53 / 28.02.03

BiP you can borrow my books any time. But look after them and DON'T CREASE THE SPINES!!! Heh heh, I'm not really that bad ... I hope.

About this whole genre thing - on the one hand I think it's a bit insulting to the artists concerned to arrange my CDs by genre ... slightly more to the point, I can't be arsed working out where I'd put everything. I mean, where would all the Prince stuff go? That's like a whole shelf on its own. I guess it would be the Prince section, he can have a genre all to himself.

Same with books, do I go with, like, drama, comedy, adventure, sci-fi, and then there's the non-fiction. Music, film, football, film, history, film, politics, film and film. Phew. Just too much like hard work.

19:46 / 04.03.03

I go by color and publisher, superficially enough. I don't like, for example, to have too many Norton Critical Editions next to each other because they all look alike and I get angry. (Stupid Norton! So expensive for broke college students!) The same goes for other editions of things that all look alike on the spine like Penguin Classics. So I spread them out and try to keep the height thing under control so short books don't disappear. And even though my system of arranging books almost depends more on unarranging them I find sometimes I give special books a special place. I think I inherited this from my dad, whose bookshelf was complete pandemonium, except Virginia Woolf got her own shelf.

The Return Of Rothkoid

20:56 / 04.03.03

Newsflash: have just discovered CDs much harder than books to shelve. Could be because there's about 2000 CDs on my loungeroom floor which have to be up by *tonight*, but I was up until 3am wondering exactly why I had some of those albums, let me tell you...

Our Lady of The Two Towers

17:33 / 05.03.03

Shelves? You were lucky to have shelves! In my day we had to kill a peasant and arrange the books along the length of their corpse...

Brigade du jour

22:04 / 10.03.03

Oh didn't I mention? My shelves are dead peasants. B-boom!

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