What's on your bookshelves?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Look away from the computer monitor for a second, towards the nearest bookshelf. What’s on it? If it is a multi-shelf unit, pick a shelf at random.

To my left, there is a bookcase. On the top shelf is:

Little Bighorn Remembered
The High Kings
The Great Famine 1845-51
Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America
Voyagers To The West
Migrations and Cultures
The Vision of the Anointed
Conquests and Cultures
The Famine Ships
Not Out Of Africa
Her Little Majesty
Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes In A Free Society
The Steel Bonnets
The Candlemass Road
Mr. American
Black Ajax
Parthian Shot

2

Oh, and one booklight, a toy tractor, and a mini-Dodger batting helmet that once held ice cream at Dodger Stadium.

3

Xenakis - Formalised Music (been trying to get my head around it for about six years)

The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900-1600

Eco - Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, and The Search for the Perfect Language (an Amazon twofer I’ve not yet looked at!)

The Far Side Gallery 4

The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain

Lloyds Register of Shipping 1760-1960 (no fecking idea where I picked that up!)

Simon Singh - The Code Book (a recommended read for SDMB types)

And a huge pile of sheet music

4

The first shelf I see has a double row of 60-70 science fiction paperbacks.

I’ll spare y’all, except that it runs from Adams to Farmer.

5

In this room, a couple of hundred science fiction and a few assorted other paperbacks, some trade texts and references, and six or seven books on writing and editing. Looking behind me, I have to wonder why I have four copies of the ninth edition of the USC Cross Connection Manual? Does anyone need one? It’s the current issue.

The other rooms contain more, but that list gets long.

6

David Copperfield, Les Miserables, War and Peace, The Aenid, The Odyssey, The Illiad, Oliver Twist, Bleak House.

7

The Sandman collections and my Terry Pratchett books. One Furby (minus its batteries, my husband can’t stand to hear it talk), two glass owl coin banks (can’t really call them piggy banks, can I?), two owl figurines, two owl shaped jars (one full of marbles)(I haven’t lost my marbles, I know right where they are), a crystal skull, a couple of Playstation 2 games, and a couple of jigsaw puzzles in their boxes.

The lowest shelves in our house are traditionally kept bare, as the cats seem to regard them as THEIR shelves, and will clear off anything that’s put on the shelves. This is especially disturbing in the middle of the night. So, my bottom shelf is bare, except for a grey cat who is Supervising my activities.

8

The two shelves at eye level on my right are jammed with French dictionaries and French books, and books on Africa and by African authors. There’s simply too much to enumerate. I think at last inventory eight years ago, we had something like 1500 books. It’s grown significantly since then.

9

My top milkcrate contains:

David Allen’s Getting Things Done
1,000 Ways to Win Monopoly Games (which contains several that aren’t condoned by the actual rules)
The Wit and Wisdom of Archie Bunker
Trout Fishing in America
Christopher Moore’s Practical Demonkeeping
Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters
Lies My Teacher Told Me
Garrison Keillor’s Wobegon Boy
An outdated University directory
A grammar/style manual
several textbooks (The Free and the Unfree, America: A Concise History (which isn’t that concise), and two books of source material on Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s and Black Protests of the Civil Rights Movement)
The Ultimate College Survival Guide
Orson Scott Card’s Shadow Puppets
and a collection of short stories put together by a creative writing teaching assistant quite a while back.

The bottom one has:
The Straight Dope
Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal
Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 and Lake Wobegon Days
Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke
A collection of humorous short stories
Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
An American Government textbook
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward
Modern American Humor, a compilation by Bennett Cerf
and another compilation, A Treasury of American Folk Humor

10

Far too many fucking books. And I bought another half-dozen yesterday and today; I can’t keep away from used bookshops and sidewalk vendors.

There’s my whole Arkham House collection, mylar-wrapped and double-shelved.

One full shelf of James Branch Cabell, Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, Nelson Algren, James Thurber, and Henry Miller. THERE’S a dinner party guestlist for you.

Next down has jazz reference books, an annotated Man Who Was Thursday, Donald Barthelme, and some histories (World War I, the 1916 Easter Rising, the guillotine, pornography publishing in Paris).

Over one for three full double-shelves of poetry – Ginsberg, Pessoa, Robinson, Hopkins, Frost, O’Hara, Baudelaire, Yeats, Pound, Tu Fu, Swinburne, Basho, Moore, Williams, Jeffers, Thomas, Sexton, Neruda, Browning, Stevens, Ammons, Sappho, Brautigan, Plath, St. John of the Cross, Sterling, Benet, St. Vincent Millay, Tsvetaeva, Lowell (Amy and Robert), Garcia Lorca, Eliot, Poe, Rexroth, Byron, Dickinson, Apollinaire, Ashbery, Rimbaud, Snyder, Auden, Corso, Nemerov, Larkin, Tennyson, Bukowski.

A shelf-ful of Mervyn Peake, shared with my graveyard reference books.

Some art histories sharing a shelf with the complete run of Carcosa Press titles, also mylared like the Arkhams.

Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Petersburg, Don Quixote, Riddley Walker, the complete Jorkens Tales of Lord Dunsany, Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, the complete short works of Saki, Jack London, and Noel Coward, the complete Shakespeare, the complete works of Charles Fort.

I should really come up with some sort of filing system.

11

We used to have so many books on a bookshelf down here, but recently sold just about all of them and only kept the ones we really, really wanted or needed. So this is somewhat embarrassing (some are school books, most are not):

Vodka Cocktails
Pass Out - 80 cocktails to paint the town red
Mirror, Mirror
The Herbal Companion
Winetaster’s Secrets
Wine Lover’s Companion
Food Lover’s Companion
The Wine Log
Red, White, and Drunk All Over
The Good Life Guide to Enjoying Wine
The Wine Bible
On Wine
The Science of Wine From Vine to Glass
The Williams-Sonoma Wine Guide
Wine for Dummies
The World Atlas of Wine
The Oxford Companion to Wine
The New Sotheby’s Wine Encyclopedia
2 binders mostly filled with tasting notes and class handouts
The South Beach Diet

There are more upstairs, that’s just what’s on the bookshelf right next to me down here.

12

And the latter sentence is what the dinner party can discuss.

13

It’s across the room, so I’ll summarize:

Top shelf: board games.
Second shelf: Needlepoint and design books.
Third shelf: Books about games (incl. Scrabble, bridge, Jeopardy
Fourth shelf: Books specifically about crosswords plus books useful to constructing them
Fifth and sixth shelves: Misc. books about language, incl. slang dicitionaries, and dictionaries of proper names, literary allusions, etc.

14

About a dozen hardcover science fiction novels. We just moved in and most of the books are still crated up in the basement. :wink: (I’m trying to be organised about putting things back together so that things are roughly grouped by subject and the like and not scattered haphazardly all over the house like they were in the place we moved out of, so the books will be coming out slowly.)

15

Most of my books are at home, and the few I have with me are mostly in boxes. So instead my bookshelf holds:

Top: A bowl, a towel, some random papers and three DVDs that I can’t fit on…
Top shelf: Most of my DVD collection, only one of which isn’t anime, one anime VHS, and my WoW install discs.
Middle shelf: Munchkin Fu, a graphic novel (look, book!), some mini-Oreos, two binders, Guild Wars: Factions and Vegas Movie Studio + DVD
Bottom shelf: Plates, glasses, one bowl and a half-empty CD wallet.

16

Most of my books are upstairs in the den and bedroom, but at the moment the laptop and I are downstairs in the living room. Many of the books down here are coffee-table and etymology books, and include:

A 1944 Bluejackets’ Manual (it was my grandfather’s)
Slang!
Great Thoughts & Funny Sayings
Remarkable Words with Astonishing Origins
The Complete Illustrated Stories of Hans Christian Andersen
American Indian Myths & Legends
Wicked Words
Blue Streak
Stories Behind Everyday Things
I Hear America Talking
The New Harvard Dictionary of Music
A Civil Tongue
The Beatles Anthology
The Allure of Men
Beatles Gear
Imagine
M.C. Escher: His Life and Complete Graphic Work
The Complete Beatles Chronicle
The Beatles: Recording Sessions
Postcards From The Boys
A Hard Day’s Write
It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: The Making of a Television Classic
British English A to Zed
Love Signs
Beatlesongs
The Lives of John Lennon
Rolling Stone: The Photographs

Those shelves also hold some photos of family/friends, and two boxed CD collections: American Musical Theater and The Music of Disney: A Legacy in Song. Oh, and my Atari Classic 10-in-1. :slight_smile:

17

I have the same problem with EBay…

Shelf above my bed (back home in my parents) is home to a few assorted trinkets and a Gandalf the Grey figure, and the rest my SF books, in alphabetical order according to author. Goes from Clarke to Dick to Heinlein and ends with Wells.

18

Closest to me, on the right, are my music reference books, and other large books. I’ll just pick one shelf:

The Beatles Anthology
The Long And Winding Road
The Unseen Beatles
The Beatles Unseen Archives
The Beatles Album
The Beatles: A Celebration
The Complete Beatles Chronicle
The Beatles
The Beatles Files
The Beatles Forever
The Beatles…about their breakup
Paul McCartney & Wings
A Hard Day’s Write
Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now
The Beatles On Record
The Beatles: All Together Now
Black Market Beatles
The Beatles: Not For Sale
The Beatles: Drugs, Divorce And A Slipping Image
Eight Arms To Hold You: The Solo Beatles Compendium
The Beatles Recording Sessions
Shout!
Get Back
A Day In The Life
The Love You Make
The Longest Cocktail Party
Lennon Remembers
The 910’s Guide To The Beatles’ Outtakes
The CHUM Chart Book
Collectible Rock Records
Hot Wacks Book XI
The Last Wacks
Hot Wacks Book Supplement 4
The Life And Times Of Little Richard
Chuck Berry: The Autobiography
The Book Of Rock Lists
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Billboard Top 40 Hits, 6th edition
Billboard Top Pop Singles 1955-2002
Bubbling Under The Hot 100
Rock Record
1000 Album Covers
Heart Of Gold
The Far Side Gallery

…and like that. The rest of the shelves on all four walls contain more reference books, but mainly records and CDs, floor to ceiling. The living room and bedroom are full of books. My wife is a collector.

19

My fiction book shelves are closest to the computer – right behind me, in fact. I’d say that the ‘nearest one’ is the one at eye level when I’m sitting. So:

Merrill Markoe’s three adult novels – I also have her non-fiction books, and her children’s book. But those are placed on other shelves.

Christy by Catherine Marshall

9 Anne McCaffrey Pern novels. Two of them are omnibus (the Harper Hall novels in one volume; the first three Pern novels in the other).

Bimbos & Zombies by Sharyn McCrumb. Another omnibus with both Bimbos of the Death Sun and Zombies of the Gene Pool. I also own all of McCrumb’s Appalachian books; plus her volume of short stories; plus her latest one about Dale Earnhardt. But I lent them to my dad and haven’t gotten them back yet

7 By Barbara Michaels. I also own a bunch by the same author , but under the name Elizabeth Peters. But those are on the next shelf down.

Gone With The Wind

Margaret in Hollywood by Darcy O’Brian

20

Nothing!
I have no bookshelves.
I’m not illiterate, I just gave up on shelves. And keeping books.

I once lined the walls of my family room and office with books, books, and more books.

Then, after moving them a couple of times in career changes, and after a divorce, I gave up on keeping and displaying books entirely.
All of them went to the local Friends of The Library sale, and Goodwill, to be sold for pennies on the dollar.
But better discounted than collecting dust.

Now all my books are at the library, on line, or bought only to be read and given away.

I am free of those many, many bookcases, and these years later I don’t miss them at all.

I do have a dusty atlas from my childhood, one with large red areas showing the British Empire intact, etc. It’s no longer a book, however, but a nostalgic souvenir, and stays in the far back of the closet with my old teddy bear.