books, books, books, a sea of books

Long before I learned to sew or knit I was a reader.  I have fond memories of summer afternoons walking to the local library and bringing home stacks of books, devouring them and then, and then repeating the entire process the next day.  I think it was because I repeated this process so frequently that my parents had me write book reviews of every book for a while one summer.  I don’t recall that the book review assignment lasted all that long, but I kept reading.  It was not a big step from reading to acquiring books, although I do truthfully know several people who read constantly but have no urge to possess the books they have read.  It is too bad I did not acquire that gene.  I have managed, over the years to divest myself of many books, and I do read many more books from the local library system, but still the piles of books accumulate.

So now you
know the truth about me, I am a hoarder of things despite all
protestations to the contrary that I like things neat and clean…..no minimalist
I. But I do accumulate specific
things: books, fabric, yarn, patterns — too many patterns probably, especially given my pattern buying the last week or so, but they do take
up far less space than the fabric or the books. 

 
This week
has been preoccupied with the books. We have converted one of the spare bedrooms into a workout room/library and most of my "spare" time this week has been spent putting up the shelves and filling them with the books slated for this room.  It is by no means the entire collection:  our new library houses only  the gardening books, oversized art books (both very small collections) and the fiction/literature and cookbook collections (much larger).  I had in fact hoped that there would be a little more blank space on the shelves for future growth, but that growth will have to be achieved somewhere else in the house, or curtailed.

The room is small and makes maximum use of the space.  This is the long bookcase, on one end of the room, about 9 feet long by about 9 feet high.  There are 8 shelves on each wall; you only see glimpses of the top and bottom shelves in this photo.   I had hoped to get all the fiction on this wall, and I probably would have had I not used the bottom shelf for oversized art books.  As a result some of the fiction wrapped around the corner to the shorter wall, as seen on the left side of this second photo:

Here is the corner view.  It is difficult to get a good photo in a room that is only about 9 x 11 feet, I can’t get far enough from the shelves to include a complete shot.  The books on the right are on the long (9 ft wall) and the ones on the left are the shorter shelves (about 5 1/2 feet) There is a pair of file cabinets and a doorway to the left of the shelves.   

The short wall contains my cookbook collection, with the exception of that top shelf just under the ceiling, which is the beginning of the fiction and literature section, authors beginning with "A".  In the end it works out as that shelf is 8 feet up from the floor, effectively out of reach without a ladder and probably more appropriate for literary volumes than cookbooks, which will be used more frequently. 

That is Penelope Ann in the corner, my DSD’s dressform.  She is in desperate need of a new, more flattering outfit.  DSD stripped Penelope of her clothes last time she visited and I haven’t yet made her anything new, poor girl.  Penelope Ann would be about 5’6" if she had a head, so that gives you a relative sense of height in the room.

There is more to do; there is a walk-in closet in the room, out of view in these pictures, it would be behind the photographer that still needs to be cleaned out but I have had enough for now.  Even the prospect that this may become at least a partial fabric closet isn’t enough to keep me slaving away at it right now….although I have enjoyed putting away my books, and revisiting a few of them, I have been neglecting my sewing and knitting and miss them terribly.