Ideas for the storage and display of books

First off, a quick note on my return from hiatus--my thanks to all of my friends, peers, students and colleagues at the Colgate Writers' Conference, especially W6 commenters Hope and Gallagher, who workshopped their novels-in-progress with me--it was great fun, and the talks especially were better than ever this year. (They should be hitting YouTube shortly and I will repost mine here.) Hope to see you all again in 2011.

So there you have it--Rhian's office is clean. Walking into it is like walking into an orderly mind--I am jealous, and now have to go back into my studioffice and pick up all the microphone cables and other crap the floor is covered with.

One thing we discovered as Rhian started putting away the many stacks of books that used to be sitting on her floor: we don't have enough bookcases. I don't know how this is possible, I just installed a new one last year, but it's already full. We do get rid of books now and again, and I bring some to my office at school, but honestly--we need some ideas for what to do with them all.

Generally we get our bookcases at the Unfinished Furniture Store on the west side. (I think it's called something else now actually.) But the house ends up with something of a college-dorm feel, as a result. I have been trolling the internet for ideas and come up with a few--building bookshelves into staircases, recessing walls and building shelves in between studs. In our old house, we had one room with a single bookshelf up above the window frames, going around three walls--that was cool, and maybe I can build something like it again here. I could also completely transform one windowed wall of my room, the one beside my desk.

This is particularly important to me now that I have read four or five books on the iPad and found the experience surprisingly lacking. It isn't the iPad, which is fairly pleasant to use. Rather, it is the apathetic, ham-handed execution of the ebook medium in the hands of major publishers. Ugly design, formatting errors, awkward layout...one senses that they are just tossing shit up there as fast as they can to cash in on the rush.

The tech is not mature, in other words. And the paper book still feels great. So let's hear your storage ideas.

Bookcases

Wow, how lame is this? Posting about bookcases after Rhian's presentation of actual content.

But it's on my mind, because we're moving, starting next week. And most of the bookcases in our house are built-ins that I made over the years...a neat triangular one under the staircase, one that covers an entire wall of the bedroom, and a kind of CD case slash stereo table in the living room corner...and those will not be coming with us. So now we need bookcases.

There's the old cinderblocks-and-planks thing, which I thought was super cool for about five minutes when I was in graduate school...I had never had bookshelves like that before, having been too tidy and uptight as an undergraduate, at which time I had some laminated pressboard thingers my mom bought me; so those shelves had a certain frisson, a gesture toward a charming, shaggy intellectualism that I never really got around to actually embodying. In Missoula, when we were first married, I had a couple of cases I hammered together out of number 2 pine, and we still have those today--they will probably go into our office, where they will occupy the corner of the room and be painted white. (One of the two presently suffers from a hideous oaken stain that looks more or less like somebody soaked it in orange juice for three weeks.) And in my office at school there are these terrific industrial-strength wall brackets covering two walls, and bearing pretty decent stained boards--but that look is a little too institutional for home.

I have never been into those glass-fronted dealies. They are a bit too fetishy for my taste (although I didn't enjoy blowing the dust off of all my old books, either, as I was packing them today). Rhian's got her eye on one at the antique store...but even if it was worth the money, what would we honor with placement there? Our own books? Lord help us. Rare volumes? Not many of those in our place. I don't think old science fiction paperbacks would really look quite right there...though, if we bought the thing, that's what I would want to put in it.

I could do built-in shelves in the new place, but we don't have the time--I don't know if we can stand living with cardboard boxes everywhere for much longer. So I think it'll be readymade cases from the Unfinished Furniture Store, which we'll paint. A good solution, but maybe not the best one.

Unless you, readers, know a source for good, cheap, attractive, painted bookcases...?