Living with Books

Here at the library, book presentation is not so fun.  The shelves are pretty uniform, they are mostly full, some shelves might be a little floppy, the book spines might not be precisely aligned but the books are shelved in order.  Boom. Libraries can be pretty & interesting places, but it's generally not due to the way the books look on the shelf. 

Your personal library might have a little more character, Dominique Dupuich & Roland Beaufre suggest in their book Living with Books. "Far from being simple storage spaces, home libraries reveal the personalities and lifestyles of their owners," the book's blurb attests.  The authors have been allowed access into the homes of a variety of bibliophiles, collectors, writers, interior designers, journalists, & artists - they even have toured a couple of château - from France to Morocco, & they present pictures of the books collections in these homes along with interviews with some of the bibliophiles. Interview questions run along these lines:

• How did your book collection come about?
• Where are your bookcases? What are they made of?
• How do you arrange your books?
• Do you keep anything on your bookshelves apart from books?
• Where & how do you like to read?
• Are you happy with your book collection?
• Do your bookshelves provide a clue to your personality?
• What is your favorite public library?

The personal libraries featured include a four room library, ultra-functional shelving solutions, a cosy English library, & books, books, everywhere.

With this lovely book before us, your friends at abcreads thought it might be fun to invite you, our readers, to submit pictures of your personal libraries, & as much (or as little) information as you'd like to share about them, which we will include in a future blog post.  To get you started, here's a picture of one of our personal libraries!

"This is one of 3 1/2 bookcases currently found in my apartment, & the largest.  It's in the kitchen, & the bottom two shelves, which you can't see, are chock full of cookbooks.  Pictured are some of my favorite books, which get carted from place to place religiously, & they used to be shelved in the order I discovered them.  (Looking at it now though, I see somehow my high school & college years have gotten ahead of themselves.)  As you can see, shelf space is at a premium in my house, so the books are forced to share space with various knickknacks & tchotchkes, as well as my Hello Kitty tape player.  Books that are shelved horizontally are on my to-be-read-list."
~Sasha