When I decided to give a visual and written tour of our bookshelves/cases, I did worry about showing the clutter that accumulates on them, in addition to the books. I could have cleaned off the shelves for you but decided to be real and honest about the state of our bookcases. They are cluttered, heavy, and disorganized, but, hey, they are still full of good books that we have or are going to read, and I think that’s all that matters.
My husband and I do not have as big of a book collection as some book lovers do.
For some, our collection would be small.
For others, it would seem quite large.
It all depends on what each person defines as a lot of books.
Our modest collection of books is something that has been built up over a 24-year marriage and combines the smaller libraries of two people.
I had much less books than my husband when we met and married, and most of my books were from my childhood (think Little House on the Prairie and The Chronicles of Narnia).
Most of his were Stephen King and Donald Westlake or similar.
Right now, we have four and a half bookshelves that actually have books in them. We have two other bookshelves, but they have either DVDs/Blu-Rays or CDs.
Yes, we are a very analog family. We appreciate the convenience of digital and how it saves space, but we still want our physical media. There was a time when we took a break from collecting physical books and my husband filled up his Kindle. The more I realize that we don’t really own those books and Amazon could take them away whenever they want, the more uncomfortable I feel with digital media.
In addition to the bookshelves, we also have some books stacked in our attic. They were moved there after the one bookcase downstairs started to overflow and the shelves started to sag more.
This house is a lot smaller on the inside than it looks from the outside.
On the first floor, when you first walk into what would be called by most people the front door, but which we seldom use because the front steps are old and dangerous, we have a small bookcase in the foyer. This is our newest bookcase. It houses mainly my books, including my tiny Agatha Christie collection and my even smaller collection of Murder, She Wrote books. `
There are also some Erle Stanley Gardner books and some other mysteries that belong to The Husband. A Little House on the Prairie collection he purchased me a few years ago to try to replace my original paperback version from the 1980s is also there. The collection he purchased me features color illustrations and features five of the eight book series. The pages are glossy. It is very nice but I still miss my original 1980s version which disappeared when we moved.
Next to that set is a boxed set of the first six books from The Mitford Series by Jan Karon. The remainder of the books from the 15 book series are on the shelves in our dining room, with the 15th book being banished upstairs where I can’t see it because I loathed that book and how Jan practically ruined the entire series with it.
On the top shelf of this little bookcase, I have my aforementioned Agatha Christie books and my Murder, She Wrote books are a shelf down.
My original plan was to have the very top of the bookcase hold a collection of books on my seasonal hopeful lists and then I would pull books from there to read next and “in season.” This went out the window when I started collecting way too many books and didn’t want to carry them upstairs so I stacked them on top of the books as well.
Now the top of the bookcase is becoming as messy as my other bookcases were or have become. I say “were” because I did straighten a couple of our bookshelves and that made me feel a lot better and less cluttered.
Now I just have to tackle the big one in the dining room.
Speaking of the dining room, let’s move to the bookcases there.
The one bookcase is a large, Wal-Mart purchased bookcase. The other is smaller and was built by my dad when I was maybe 11 or 12, and when he started to notice I was turning out to be a reader like Mom.
My dad builds things to last which is why the shelves on his bookcase are so sturdy and the Wal-Mart shelves are sagging.
That bookcase held my Narnia and Little House books and some Christian Fiction/Romance books and sometimes Mom would come in and instruct me to clean my room. For some reason I considered part of cleaning my room rearranging my bookcase so I would take all of the books off the shelves and as I was attempting to put them back up in the order I wanted them, I started looking at them, sat down in the pile and forgot about cleaning. Mom would find me sitting there reading, drawing, or doing something other than what she asked me to do and eventually she could clean it herself.
Yes, it is true I may have a touch of ADD.
Right now the bookcase Dad made me houses Little Miss’s homeschool books and a bunch of books I bought for her and I to read together for school or for leisure.
I’m hoping to have at least one more year where she lets me read to her and then maybe she will start reading books on her own.
That bookcase also has a mix of my and my husband’s books.
The Walmart bookcase next to it needs reorganizing. It is a mess. The books are sort of just shoved in there, every which way.
We have a mix of my books and my husbands, again, with the bulk of my library-bound Jan Karon books that I’ve picked up from various used book sales over the years in there. My husband has the complete set of Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) books and a collection of various history and/or political books.
I weeded books out of the two bookshelves in the spring and put the books in bags to be taken to free little libraries near us but so far they are still sitting in the floor by the bookcase. I hope to remedy that in the next couple of weeks to make room for another, more narrow bookcase.
Another bookcase along that wall holds our CD collection — everything from blues, country, rock, Christian, classic rock, and everything in between is on those shelves. There are also collections of old radio programs.
We have a record/CD/cassette/radio unit that we purchased from Amazon a few years ago to play all that music but we don’t do it as often as we should.
Moving to the upstairs, we have a bookcase in the middle of our hallway against the wall.
This one is one our neighbor was giving away. It started as a hodge podge of both of our books but now that my Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys collection is growing, it’s slowly becoming the home for that collection. So far they fill the second shelf but I’m hoping to take over the first and third shelfs over the next couple of years.
The other night my son thought he was funny and used post-it notes to label everything upstairs — or a bunch of things.
I think this is what he thinks I am because of my Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys collection… *snort laugh*
I don’t know what my poor husband is going to do with his books. *wink*
Right now he has a lot of them in our room in a new bookcase he found at a thrift store near us and there is plenty of room for more to be added there. I didn’t add a photo of this because I forgot to take one and don’t want to head back upstairs. I can say it has a little of thrillers, Lee Child, James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, etc. and an old fashioned CD player we bought The Husband as a gift for his birthday last year.
So that was a short tour of our bookcases. I didn’t mention that Little Miss has a small one in her room and that The Boy does as well. I’ll go through their bookcases another time. And I also didn’t get into nitty gritty detail on what is on the shelves our bookcases but maybe one day I’ll take each book out and talk about it. Or maybe not.
How many bookcases/shelves are in your house?
