Saturday, December 18, 2010

Horizontal Books, and other Orientations

I'm not surprised that it's been two weeks since I last posted, what with all the brouhaha going on in our household leading up to Christmas!

One of the things I've noticed with my library in the past few weeks is the increasing number of books that are in a horizontal position.  This is because there's no place to stand them up vertically, so I have to lay new books on top of other books!  Seeing this wouldn't lead anyone to expect that I'm organized.  But think about it ... look at the shelves of books in a law office commercial, how nice and neat and tidy they are, and then look at the shelves of books in someone's home office, someone who reads a lot, maybe writes a lot.  Could be a professor or teacher.  Those shelves are frequently jam-packed with horizontal books.

But these horizontal books are now hiding half the clock in my office so I can't see what time it is for thirty minutes every hour.  Some of these books are horizontal because they simply don't fit on the shelves because of their height.  But a more serious problem is putting a book in vertical on either its spine or the opposite side.  Why?  Because you can't see the title of the book.  And then you do like I did recently and buy a second copy of a book by accident because you didn't realize you already had it, because you couldn't see the title.

Book crowding frequently causes me to start weeding out books to make room for new ones.  But it's getting where I'm having trouble identifying more books to weed out.

Woe is me.  Woe is every other bibliophile out there with not enough room for more books.

UPDATE, December 20:  Take a look at this blog posting: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2010/11/beautiful-bookshelves-how-do-you-sort-yours.  This gave me some ideas.  If my shelves only went floor-to-ceiling, and then extended to the end of the wall, I could probably get 40% more shelf-space.  But that would mean convincing my wife that we should (a) sell the existing shelves that match the decor and (b) pay someone to build the new shelves.  Is there no way out?  :)

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