Is it odd that the furniture responsible for housing and displaying my books holds meaning for me in addition to the books themselves? Maybe, but this is a ‘shelf portrait,’ so I don’t care. The shelf on the left has been with me through two moves and three degrees, and the one on the right was a gift - a necessary addition following my recent discovery of warehouse book sales (thanks JK). This little corner is a lovely reminder that my book-nerdiness is part of a larger community of friends and family who share the same passion. The books are prized possessions, and I am kind of a packrat with them, keeping even textbooks that have long (long) outlived their usefulness. I organize my shelves by subject category and then alphabetically, making it supremely easy for curious friends to find and borrow the latest booksale find, indie-press freebie, or Wheelock’s Latin.
- Sarah, Toronto, ON, Canada
The Naked Shelf, compared to those that will eventually adorne this website my bookcase is pretty naked. Living in a relatively small place my bookcase has taken on a purpose far beyond holding books. You can probably tell from the picture that music is my first love due to the roughly 300 CDs (how 90s of me) sandwiched between my two bookcases. I am slowly building a book collection to be proud of. When looking at my books, they are organized alphabetically by author and within each author they are chronological. The exception to this rule is my ever expanding collection of Lonely planet guides which are placed in order of when I visited the country. Hopefully in the not too distant future (following a couple trips to Toronto and book hunting with JK) I will be able to post an update with a much more “clothed” bookcase.
— Kevin, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
So here it is… my bookshelf. Since the big move, I haven’t been able to fix up my bookshelf the way I like it, which is to have it in alphabetical order, but I love the way it looks right now and if you asked me to find a particular book in the crowd, I’d be able to find it no problem. You’ll see in the picture that the bottom right hand shelf is packed with books, these are the books that I love and will never give away. Every other shelf are my TBR (to be read) books. So you’ll see I’ve got a lot of books to read… lol.
— Reeder, Toronto, ON, Canada
These were my shelves about a year ago (photos of their evolution will follow later). Organization is alphabetical by author for fiction, memoir, or theory; non-fiction is organized by subject. Why? Easy to use and democratic. I like my books to mingle and cross-fertilize as they would in my psyche, put them with strange bedfellows. My favourite pair of accidental neighbours? T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems beside a romance novel called Practice Makes Pregnant.
— JK (site administrator), Toronto, Ontario, Canada
