To give you some more information about the strategy (and it was discussed extensively before the project began as well as throughout the endeavor!), I’ll share how it all played out. We started by unpacking books from boxes as well as taking off of shelves from my office one copy of each of the books I’ve sold during my almost eighteen years at DGLM.

We then labeled the shelves with post-its indicating which category of books would go into which shelves. The broad sections include adult fiction, cookbooks, illustrated/craft, practical nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, and children’s. For categories where we had more books, we used more shelves. For the cookbooks, we divided them into sections: general, vegetarian/vegan, and baking and then alphabetized them within the section. Then we filled in the two top shelves with foreign editions of my titles.

We mixed the style of display with horizontal and vertical and left a few books standing up and facing out, and then filled in some blank spaces with decorative touches and picture frames. At that point, we’d filled ten of the fourteen sections, and the other four sections we used for additional cookbooks, miscellaneous awesome books (Hamilton!), and my beloved large and growing collection of books signed by the author, which includes mostly children’s books (I’m that person who will go to an author event with or without my children to get a signed book!) and a few celebrity titles.

I have a lot more books that I’ve read and collected over the years, but I didn’t want to pack the shelves too tight so I could leave room for more of my own titles to fill in. At some point I’ll get another large bookcase which I’ll put  in a different room to house  the others, but for now I’m happy my living room bookshelf project is finally complete.

Please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for changes or improvements!

Finally, the bookshelf project has come to fruition (see below) and I now find myself with two very large empty built-in bookcases and a big question of how to fill them.

I’d love some help from our blog readers. How do you store your books? Are they organized by category, color, alphabetical or some combination? I love those photos I’ve seen of spines organized by color so the shelves have a rainbow effect, but it seems so impractical to me as someone who will likely be adding books on a regular basis.

Because I represent books in many categories for both children and adults, it seems that might be the way to go. As one of my friends pointed out, though, because this is the first thing you see when you walk in my house, the books should be for display rather than for storage purposes. My instinct initially was to cram as many books as possible in to the shelves, but I think she has a point. Maybe this is a case where less is more. Below you’ll see some of the books I’ve represented that I currently have stacked on my piano.

I also like the idea of doing a combination of horizontal and vertical stacks. Should there be a pattern to that?

Would love to know what you think and how you display your books. Please feel free to send photos along. I love the visuals. And if anyone would like to volunteer to come help with what feels like an overwhelming project, please let me know!

Mr. Yeats attended two universities with me and lives his life with paper clips marking the poems I’ve studied and annotated.

Heaney and Muldoon live on my shelf in many forms, but NORTH and QUOOF actually live at my office. Six months before I began working at DGLM, I turned in my master’s thesis on these two collections. And something about identity and politics. I’m not sure I ever knew what I was trying to say about them. But now they live in my office reminding me of what words can do and why I broker them for a living.

Last week, Sharon and I were discussing a book she wants to read that I own a copy of, and we agreed on the one major failing of borrowing a book:  you don’t get to keep it.  I’m a hard copy person (a trade paperback person, if we’re getting specific), and I not only want to own physical copies of the books I’ve read and loved, I want to own the exact copy I read and loved.  I’ll borrow a galley if I want to read the book before I can buy it and don’t have a copy of my own, but if the book is available for purchase, I’d rather go buy it just in case I love it enough to give it a permanent home on my shelves. 

I mean, sure, I could borrow the book and go out and buy my own if it turns out to be worthy, but then I wouldn’t have an emotional attachment to the book as an object as well as to the book’s contents, and it’s just not the same.  I’ve always wanted to be a library person, since it’s obviously more fiscally sensible, but ultimately I’d rather forego new clothes and expensive dinners and fancy technology and living in a trendy neighborhood so I can curate my own personal library. One day I’m going to be a rich person with a dedicated library and rolling ladder, and I want the books that I fly past Beauty in the Beast-style to tell the story of my reading history.

To the left, my reading-worn original. To the right, my pristine copy signed by the master himself.

This is such a strong issue, that it turns out both Sharon and I have some books that we own in two copies: the one we read, and the one we got signed at an event.  I’m not really that big on signed books, but obviously, you can’t get rid of a signed copy, especially if it was personalized. But how am I supposed to part with the object I was holding in my hands as I experienced a book that means something to me?  That would just be insane.  So I’ll just persist with multiple copies of Let the Great World Spin on my shelves forever.  

Emma Donoghue signed this, my most prized BEA galley of all time, after it had been read by me and several friends of mine.

Many of the books I own have lived on two continents, in two countries, in three towns/cities, in two boroughs of NYC, and in around ten apartments.  I paid about $100 extra just to get all my books on the plane when I moved home after grad school in Ireland.  And when I’m old and grey, they’ll still be there, physical reminders of the worlds I’ve had the good fortune to temporarily inhabit.

These are some of Sharon’s special totems (plus she also has the same double McCann “problem” that I do). I’m most envious of her signed copy of Roxane Gay’s AN UNTAMED STATE, with that incredible inscription. Though Matt Weiland is no slouch at book signing himself.

]]> http://www.dystel.com/blog/2016/02/form-function/feed/ 1 http://www.dystel.com/blog/2015/04/shelves-and-piles-and-stacks-and-heaps-and-boxes/ http://www.dystel.com/blog/2015/04/shelves-and-piles-and-stacks-and-heaps-and-boxes/#comments Fri, 03 Apr 2015 19:27:58 +0000 http://www.dystel.com/?p=11278 I have a friend visiting this week, so naturally yesterday when I got home from work there was a frenzy of cleaning to do.  A lot of that frenzy involved putting books away, and I realized that from an outsider’s perspective, the specificity of where books go in my apartment might seem a little odd.

Of course there are the regular bookcases, sorted by client v. non-client, subrights client v. my client, picture book v. middle grade/YA v. adult, fiction  v. non-fiction, collection v. single author, and probably many more.  My 4+ years of booksellerdom have really stuck with me.

Then there’s the stack of books to give away: the ones I accidentally bought twice, or bought but then remembered I have the galleys already, or brought home multiple times from the DGLM giveaway pile, or read and disliked enough to not want to make space for them, or plan to lend rather than gift because I know someone who will love them as much as I did.  That stack has post-it notes on it marking who they’re for.

The other post-it note pile, actually shelf, is the books I’ve borrowed, each indicating whom they belong to so when I’m done reading I’ll remember to put them in the giveaway stack instead of on the regular bookcases with the books that actually belong to me.

Then there’s the box of books I’m donating because I don’t know anyone who’d really want them—which has been sitting near my front door for at least a month now, but I swear I really will make the time to go donate them…soon.

And of course there’s the temporary pile, where books accumulate throughout the week for sorting into one of the above mentioned sections, along with various papers I need to file or deal with.

But the most prominent book space in my apartment is the one that sits just beside my TV.  Those are the books I’m in the middle of and don’t want to put down too long lest I lose the thread.  That also includes the books I have to read by a certain date, for one of my three book clubs, say, or because I’m planning to attend an author event.  Also there are books I need to read sooner rather than later, for work reasons or because I really want to or because I know that someone I know is reading, too, and I want to be able to talk to her/him about it.  The last part of that stack is the magazines I had to have because this time I was definitely, definitely going to read them, and I can’t recycle them because no, seriously, I’m going to read them this time.  (Among those magazines right now is a World Cup issue of something, which I think about every time I bring it home a new magazine friend to live with forever on my TV stand.)  That’s the pile I’m excited about, that I don’t want to forget about, that I need to feel guilty about not turning to when I’m Netflixing the 8 millionth episode of Friends.

As I sorted books from the temporary pile into all these other homes, I thought about how, outside of publishing, even my very literate friends usually only have a bookcase, maybe two, and certainly fewer teetering piles of doom.  Maybe they read e-books or listen to audiobooks.  Maybe they use the library or give their books away when they’re done because this is New York City, for goodness sake, and space is at a premium.  But you know what?  As I looked around my clean apartment before going to bed last night, it was actually the thing I was most proud of—it’s not such a bad apartment over all, but mostly there are books everywhere you look.

So, I’ve been doing a lot of research on book storage, bookshelves and the like and I’m wondering if any of our readers can share pictures of their own book storage solutions, either at home or online if you have an aspirational shelving unit in mind. I’m thinking about fun, contemporary concepts rather than straightforward wood shelves, although we’re considering that too. Metal, distressed wood, or a combination of the two are ideas I’m considering. Meantime, I have my books displayed on our piano, which I kind of like and will probably keep newer titles there even after we get the shelves built. See pic below:

Please let me know how you like to store your books at home. As added incentive, I will offer a free book to add to your shelf, and pick the winner at random on March 25^th. Thanks for your input and good luck!