biblioklept

Book shelves series #5, fifth Sunday of 2012: In which we leave the southern wing of the house where the bedrooms are and enter a formal sitting room.

Okay. So. When I started this project, it was easy to identify the rooms in the house—they were bedrooms. As we go, I’ll have to occasionally make up names for rooms, often names that don’t really fit. Our house is a 1956 ranch with some of the atomic flavor, so it’s long and rectangular and very open—rooms open up into other rooms; spaces are demarcated more by ideas of rooms and not, say, walls. The house is essentially three sections; we’ve left the first, the bedrooms, and now move into a series of rooms for living and eating and cooking and sitting. And reading. I mapped out a little route for the rest of this series, and the first stop is this mid-century LP cabinet in what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, our formal sitting room. The cabinet once held many of my records but is now filled with comic books (more on those next week).

The books that set on top of it are coffee tablish, I suppose, and they tend to rotate, although there’s usually a stray novel or two that sets here as well. Today we’ll look at the two on top now: Penguin by Design and Atomic Ranch.

There’s also an Emerson Wondergram record player that sets on the table; I suppose it was the iPod of its day (see one in action here).

Atomic Ranch is my wife’s, although I don’t really make such distinctions when it comes to books. We lived for years in a bungalow and she amassed books dedicated to craftsman homes during that time; when we moved to the ’50s ranch, she wanted this:

Penguin by Design is essential for anyone who drools over beautiful modern book covers.

My pics are lousy—sorry—but just a few editions I’d love to pick up one day:

Next week, we’ll look at some of the comic books inside the cabinet.