Bookshelf Pictures

I have noticed a number of people during the quarantine are posting pictures of their bookshelves. This seemed like something I could do, and I psyched myself up for the task by saying that if other people's bookshelves are of interest to the internet reading public, surely mine must be to someone. My bookcases are scattered over several rooms throughout the house and are not terribly organized, but there are some basic themes running through them.

1 & 2. This is the main bookcase of the house, and the largest, in what is now something of a front sitting room, where the children practice their musical instruments and there is a round table in the middle where people could read books and newspapers if anyone did such things anymore. The first photo is the left side of this bookcase. It has a number of St. John's books in it, including a set of the Great Books itself across the top. You can see a few Harvard Classics, though I don't make an especial point of collecting those, next to the Anthony Powells on the third shelf from the bottom. There are also a few Norton Anthologies and Foreign Language dictionaries and other reference books here. The bottom two shelves are for kind of small books with ugly covers that can fit on them.

The right side of this bookcase. On the top is the set of I.W.E. encyclopedias whose reading list forms the basis of my other blog. Just below that is the eclectic "World's Greatest Literature" set from the 30s which I have had since I was a teenager (I am still missing 2 of the set of 20 though). The bottom shelf contains a bunch of atlases and large art and travel picture books that no one looks at anymore, including me, though most of these I have had since my childhood/young adulthood and I used to look at them all the time. The third row from the top is where I stick all of my clunky clothbound 900 page 1950s era books.

3. This is in the living room. The television (not visible) sits on top of this. This bookcase was in my grandparents' basement forever, and it appears in family pictures going back at least to the 1940s, before they moved to the house they lived in when I knew them. When they had it it was full of bestsellers and book of the month club selections, which I didn't keep. I preserve it exclusively for hardcover books, mostly literature, printed, if not necessarily written, from the 20s to the 50s. There are a lot of my Modern Library books in here, including most of the "Giants", though I don't on the whole make a point of keeping all of those together.

4. Also in the living room, though in somewhat of a dark corner. This is probably the nicest bookcase I have, as a piece of furniture. This holds mostly smaller Modern Library books with one shelf of Loeb Classics and a few other old similarly shaped classic type books, small blue Oxford editions and the like. The radio on top was my grandfather's, AM only. He used to listen to it in his basement in the 70s, and presumably had been doing so for years before that, in the afternoons when he drank beer. Sometime in the early 80s he got cable TV down there and didn't listen to the radio as much in the afternoons anymore. At some point within the last decade I plugged it in to listen to the baseball games before I gave in and paid for my sons to be able to watch them on TV, and it stilled worked. It's very loud and clear actually, and the static had that whirligig 1950s time capsule quality.

5. The whatnot. This is a pretty starchy set of literary classics that my wife found set out in a box by the side of a woodland road some years back. Most of the volumes are things I either already have or am probably never going to read, though there are a couple that I might use someday. In truth at the time I think she likely got them with this piece of furniture in mind, and they do contribute something to the dignity of the room.

6. This cabinet is built into the wall in the corner of the dining room, and was probably intended to display cups and dishes. I keep a lot of my newer paperbacks in here, Penguin Classics and the like, as well as other newer (post-1990) sets, the Oxford Illustrated Dickens and Jane Austen sets are here, and newer Modern Library and Everyman's. The first four volumes of Knausgaard are here. I liked those enough that I would like to get around to finishing the series, which I have now had a several years' hiatus from, someday. There are a number of late 90s/early 2000s era tourist guidebooks here as well which I am not quite ready to get rid of yet, though it might be a substantial step forward in my development to do so.

7. This is kind of an extra shelf of my wife's in the front hallway. Her Greek and Latin collection is here along with a bunch of her occupational binders and notebooks.

8. On the staircase landing. Mostly old children's books on the top two shelves that none of my children have ever read, but that I am holding onto just in case either of my daughters, now 5 and 8, should take an interest in them. The third shelf has a motley collection of serious books (I see Ulysses, and a Euclid, and The Great Gatsby and maybe Hemingway) that are either second copies or couldn't be fit in anywhere else. The bottom shelf are photo albums, which we stubbornly kept up making with film prints up to about 2010, after which we succumbed to modernity. 

9. Another extra shelf in the ill-lit, narrow upstairs hallway. I had to reach out my hand against the opposite wall just to get a blurry partial picture. This has a lot of second copies of St John's books, gift books I've never read, gifts I've gotten my children that they've never read, a Smiths biography, a circa-2000 guide to literary agents that I have no idea why I am still keeping. The most disorderly shelf in the house.

10. A small shelf in my bedroom that contains movie/entertainment books, sports books, school yearbooks, travel guidebooks that even predate the ones downstairs, notebooks with my manuscripts from when I used to write, my wife's St. John's manuals--even I did not keep those.

11 & 12. These are boxes piled up in the sitting room with books I have no shelf space for. A lot of them are full of children's books that people have gleefully dumped on us over the books and that frankly I think we are going to have to get rid of, though around three or four of them are the books I got in New York last summer and that I need to be able to see because I cannot remember what is there, and I have already ordered one book this spring from the internet that I had forgotten I had on hand because I couldn't see it. 

The new shelf is going to be in this corner. It is supposed to be one of our quarantine projects. My wife has great plans for the design and paint scheme. I honestly just want to be able to see the books. I don't care what color the shelves are.

I am of course having a lot of mixed, inconsistent, what have you, opinions regarding the ongoing pandemic lockdown, though if I were to try to write about them tonight I wouldn't be able to get this posted, so I won't do it tonight. I am as usual unable to be in complete lockstep agreement, not least emotionally, with the educated east coast people, though God knows I would be so much happier if I could think and feel as intensely and clearly and rightly as they do, and go to bed every night knowing I was one of those lucky guys that the angry liberal women I have always loved were not angry at, but held up as a one in a thousand example of righteous progressive virtue. "That Bourgeois Surrender...he gets it," they would sigh with perhaps a barely perceptible heaving of the bosom as they lifted the wine glass to...yes, well I had better stop and explain myself more clearly in a future post...