About a month ago I moved a third bookshelf into my room. With glass doors on the top shelves and cabinets at the bottom, I could finally move some of my collectible titles into safer storage and reorganize my other two shelves! It took a little time to decide exactly how I wanted things to look and, finally, I decided on function over form. (
How can you bear to break up a series just to make a rainbow?? HOW?!?)
While they may not go in Roy G. Biv order there is still an abundance of pretty books to see! Size constraints mean that some shelves are still mismatched from where I'd truly like them to be; on the bright side, however, books are no longer stacked on my floor—or on top of one another in the shelves, either!
This is the final bookshelf on the tour and it houses some of my most treasured reads. I'm so excited to share them with you!
I was ecstatic to "steal" this bookcase from the guest bedroom because the top two shelves have tinted glass doors that can help keep dust and sunlight out. The only downside is that the books I want to keep behind them just barely fit into the space, so you can see how I have to carefully jigsaw things together and that there isn't much room to grow. I want to take such good care of these particular books because they're all first printings (with the exception of
Sorcerer's Stone and the paperback
Subtle Knife) and I hope to keep them in good condition the rest of my life.
I'm a little anxious over how big the illustrated
Goblet of Fire will be—on optimistic days I think all of my illustrated Harry Potter editions can fit in that top left stack...until I remember what beasts GoF and OotP were. I'll also have no room for future house editions but...we'll figure that one out later! 😂 Just like the rest of the Book of Dust trilogy...
(And that purple lump on top of my illustrated Harry Potters? That's an LSU flag we fly every football and baseball season! In a couple of weeks it will leave its cozy, air-conditioned home to take up its post at the front of the house again.)
To be honest, all of the books on this particular set of shelves ought to go behind glass doors, these beauties included.
Circe was my very first Goldsboro Books purchase earlier this year, and now I'm addicted! I have several more titles pre-ordered from them and, although it is a little pricier than buying US editions or shopping on Book Depository, I love having something just a bit more special for certain authors.
Spinning Silver has the special foiled dust jacket that Del Rey offered as a pre-order incentive; right now I have it fitted over the regular jacket, but once copies start showing up at my local used bookstore I'm tempted to purchase an extra so that I can have both on display.
As you can see, I have a
mild...
no, healthy...no,
fervent adoration of the Winternight trilogy by Katherine Arden. I first bought her books as US hardbacks, but the illustrated UK covers are gorgeous, so I tracked down paperbacks of those as well. I'm so anxious for
The Winter of the Witch to join its sisters early next year! There was no difference in the US and UK covers for
Furyborn, but I hope to have a similar collection for it as Claire continues the trilogy.
Because I read so little non-fiction (I'm working on it—I swear!) I don't really need an entire shelf dedicated to rare or special editions, but it felt a little unfair to mix them in with all my others. Laying down beside them is a coffee table-style book on the costumes and production of
Phantom Thread, which I won from the film studio earlier this year; my only copy of
I Capture the Castle, which has particular sentimental value to me; and one of the earliest printings of
Fahrenheit 451, which I stumbled on in an used bookshop for $1! Normally those three books actually lean up against the other side of the shelf and I store my flute and sheet music in the empty space, but that stack is a
total mess right now!
The bottom two shelves are actually behind cabinet doors and stay completely out of sight. This was the perfect place for my old textbooks and reference books that I still use, as well as a few other science and philosophy books that I've collected throughout my education. Several of them were gifts from family members or academic mentors, including the Cousteau books (one of which is signed) and the Dictionary of Synonyms (top right, black spine). The latter is one of my most-used reference books and I highly recommend it to anyone who writes! It differs from a thesaurus in that it doesn't just list out all the words similar to one you looked up; instead it gives definitions and brief explanations of the related words, including the subtle differences in their usage and when one word may be more appropriate than another.
I...also store my diplomas here 😂 For the last six years I've been meaning to purchase frames for them and simply haven't bothered. At least this way I always know where they are? Right now they're sandwiched between my personal copy of my Master's thesis and my senior year high school yearbook (no, your screen isn't dirty; I blurred the spine since it has some personal details!).
And those are my bookshelves! Are any of your favorites on my shelves too? Do you store any of your books in a special way?
No comments:
Post a Comment