Bookcase – Page 2 – Biblioklept

Book Shelves #33, 8.12.2012

August 12, 2012August 19, 2012 Biblioklept3 Comments

Book shelves series #33, thirty-third Sunday of 2012

This is the end cap shelf of the coffee table in our family room, which is really the room where the kids play.

Mostly old ratty Shakespeare paperbacks and other slim volumes. Some of the hundreds of CDs I have that I haven’t played in ages.

Books:

I reread Henry IV last year, using these editions; still one of my favorite plays.

Contains some of my favorite moments in literature (I especially love the part where Falstaff calls his soldiers his “rag of Muffins”):

Book Shelves #31, 7.29.2012

July 29, 2012July 29, 2012 Biblioklept2 Comments

Book shelves series #31, thirty-first Sunday of 2012

When I started this project I thought it would be a fun way to keep stock of the books that I have, and also a way to perhaps question why I hold on to the books that I hold on to.

I mean, why keep a book after you’ve read it?

Anyway, at times throughout this series I’ve gotten bored, or rushed; other times I’ve thought the idea was stupid, or narcissistic, or something even worse (although I don’t know what).

I like the shelves above the pedestrian, utilitarian jobber that I’ll feature this Sunday and the next: lots of aesthetically pleasing stuff there.

Not so this one, which holds photos and cookbooks and art books and old notebooks and sketchbooks and every kind of etcetera:

At least that’s what I thought until I started digging into the cramped top shelf, dutifully bound to this project.

I wound up really enjoying myself, pausing over volumes that I haven’t looked at in ages, like this beauty:

I’m not sure if the aesthetic joy of this postcard collection comes across in these lousy iPhone photo shots.

I got this on a trip to London when I was 11. It was just my mom and my brother and I. First we went to Singapore. We were coming back to the States for Christmas, and also to live, eventually. My brother broke his leg in Singapore jumping down some stairs and we didn’t realize it was broken until we got back to Florida.

I used to draw and paint all the time, especially as a kid. Mostly animals.

There are at least a dozen skinny books like this on the shelf:

I must have done hundreds of these as a kid:

The shelf is also full of old comic strip collections that you probably recognize, like these guys:

And this guy (and yes, I have the 7″ record from this collection)

I also spent half an hour revising Rublowsky’s 1965 volume Pop Art, which is kind of fascinating in its contemporary proximity to its subject.

The cover’s not interesting, but Ken Heyman’s photos are; they show the artists in process. This one is kinda famous:

And here’s Roy Lichtenstein:

Book Shelves #30, 7.21.2012

July 22, 2012July 21, 2012 Biblioklept2 Comments

Book shelves series #30, thirtieth Sunday of 2012

See a full length shot of this book shelf (or don’t).

Lots of publication series editions here, including this batch of Melville House Art of the Contemporary Novella:

I reviewed most of these and they’re all very good—especially Sandokan.

Some ratty ratty Penguin Classics that I procured from various institutions I won’t name here. The Mallory was a particular obsession for a few years:

The Rousseau Coloring Book was a gift from a friend to our daughter, but I stole it and put it up here.

I reviewed all of Picador’s BIG IDEAS // small books series; I actually got a new one, Privacy, in the mail the other day. Violence and Humiliation are particularly good.

Next to those: various World of Art series books, most of them my wife’s. (Bonus points if you guess mine correctly):

I have no idea why these books are grouped here like this; I’m guessing they were all in the same box when we moved. I know we have multiple copies of several of these:

There’s a basket with a Klee book and some mini umbrellas and other stuff, not pictured, and then this lot on the end, including to “Introducing” books that are remainders from my freshman year of college; they are terrible and I should get rid of them. I stole this edition of The Stranger from my high school in the 10th or 11th grade. The Chronicles of Narnia box set was a gift from my aunt when I was like seven or eight:

Book Shelves #29, 7.15.2012

July 15, 2012July 15, 2012 Biblioklept6 Comments

Book shelves series #29, twenty-ninth Sunday of 2012

Lots of hardbacks on this long, long shelf. The Vonneguts above were particularly important to me when I was young. They were my father’s. I read them surreptitiously for years and then outright appropriated them at some point. The matching Dodd, Mead hardbacks were rescued from a school I worked at for years. My wife made the vase that serves as a bookend. The copy of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell that doesn’t quite fit in the frame remains unread.

The BFG: a classic. I reviewed Wabi Sabi. Next to the Crumb:

I found Holidays in a box of free books in a library lobby. Love it. Here’s this week’s schedule of holidays:

One of my favorite books ever is Mitsou, a book that Balthus did when he was like 10 or 12 or something:

It’s about a young boy who gets a cat and loves the cat and then loses the cat. It’s heartbreaking. Image:

And next to this one:

Shelf’s end:

Book Shelves #28, 7.08.2012

July 8, 2012July 8, 2012 Biblioklept9 Comments

Book shelves series #28, twenty-eighth Sunday of 2012

Last month, or maybe the month before last, I forget, an anonymous reader accused me of not putting as much into these posts as I used to, which may or may not be true.

But I’m exhausted today—I’ve been out of town for the past week, enjoying a beach vacation with family and friends &c., and yeah, I’m fragged. Got home late late last night, had to clean up, mow the lawn, all that snazz. (The blog has been on autopilot but I’ll try to write up some original content for next week—maybe a review of Moonrise Kingdom. We’ll see).

Anyway, this Sunday finds us in a new room, the converted garage of my 1956 ranch-style home, a room we use as a family room. I’ll look at each shelf pictured above individually and remark on a few books (there’s some good stuff in there), but I’m just too tired. Sorry the pic is so blurry. Feel free to send me a newer iPhone.

There are two book cases below these shelves, and on top of one of these, under a large framed picture of my children that obscures them, are these ratty volumes:

The Barth books are a throwback to my early college days, when I simply bought the cheapest volume; I don’t buy mass market paperbacks anymore (okay, maybe rarely). The Shakespeare books are too tall to fit on a shelf full of Shakespeare stuff, although there are a few shelves of Shakespeare stuff in the room. Actually, I’m not really sure why these books are here at all. It’s likely that I hid them behind the aforementioned large framed picture one day while cleaning up and never reshelved. Not a pretty shelf.

Book Shelves #27, 7.01.2012

July 1, 2012July 1, 2012 Biblioklept2 Comments

Book shelves series #27, twenty-seventh Sunday of 2012

There are 27 Sundays in 2012, so today’s post is the half way mark for this series, I guess.

This is an obscure little shelf on the side of a piece of furniture that holds the TV in our den. These are travel books, phrase books, etc., which I’m not sure if people still buy—I mean, I don’t buy them anymore, at least not if I’m going to go somewhere. I use the internet, or iPhone apps. Maybe I need to go to some place without 3G or wireless coverage.

There are some other relics here, too, on the shelf above this one—CDs and DVDs.

Book Shelves #26, 6.24.2012

June 24, 2012June 24, 2012 Biblioklept2 Comments

Book shelves series #26, twenty-sixth Sunday of 2012: Some old art books.

This little shelf sits next to a solitary couch in a den/fireplace room that abuts the eat-in kitchen. The shelf is mostly to hold the occasional drink if feet are propped on the coffee table. There are old art books in here, dating back to high school and college, when my wife and I (separately, of course, in those days) still bought lots and lots of art books, before the internet made accessibility to images so ubiquitous. As such, the shelf holds books that reflected our tastes of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years ago: Lots of Pre-Raphaelite and Romantic stuff (hers) and lots of surrealist/modernist/cubist stuff (mine). Anyway. These rarely get dug out these days. If I want to check out Burne-Jones I usually visit an online gallery.

The portrait of Joan Miro and his daughter in the upper right corner is by the painter who called himself Balthus. I love the painting. It’s deeply creepy but also tender.

Book Shelves #22, 5.27.2012

May 27, 2012May 27, 2012 Biblioklept1 Comment

Book shelves series #22, twenty-second Sunday of 2012: Tolkien, Faulkner, McCarthy

As always, sorry for the glare. Shooting this case head on is almost impossible because of the windows on the other side of the room. Anyway.

I’ve read everything by Cormac McCarthy with the exception of his screenplay for The Gardener’s Son, which I found a week or two and picked it up. I don’t own a copy of No Country for Old Men because I haven’t found one that isn’t a movie tie-in.

This copy of The Lord of the Rings—my first—was a kind gift from some friends we were staying with in Melbourne (the one in Australia, not Florida).

I’ve read it at least four times; I have other copies of LoTR and have read them too. It’s probably the book I’ve read the most, although I haven’t read it since 2002. This copy is kindly inscribed:

There’s a slim space on the shelf that currently holds a few books that I’ve been meaning to read:

Book Shelves #20, 5.13.2012

May 13, 2012May 12, 2012 BibliokleptLeave a comment

1.4. Things which aren’t books but are often met with in libraries

Photographs in gilded brass frames, small engravings, pen and ink drawings, dried flowers in stemmed glasses, matchbox-holders containing, or not, chemical matches (dangerous), lead soldiers, a photograph of Ernest Renan in his study at the College de France, postcards, dolls’ eyes, tins, packets of salt, pepper and mustard from Lufthansa, letter-scales, picture hooks, marbles, pipe-cleaners, scale models of vintage cars, multicoloured pebbles and gravel, ex-votos, springs.

—From Georges Perec’s essay “The Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books”

Book shelves series #20, twentieth Sunday of 2012: In Which I Try to Prove I Am Not Just Phoning It In

Last week I was accused of “going through the motions” with this project, which accusation may or may not be true. I was out of town on vacation, and last week’s post was composed a few days ahead of time in a harried rush of end-of-the-semester grading + summer semester planning + packing + bad bad writer’s block.

The shelf featured last week is the top shelf in the shot above.

Here is a detail of the shelf below, which clearly features things which are not books:

My wife and I—not actually married at the time, kids really—bought these kokeshi dolls when we were living in Japan. We lived in Tokyo, but I’m almost positive we bought these on a vacation in Kyoto. (Or maybe it was in Kamakura. Or I suppose it could have been in Tokyo).

The screen in the background was a gift from a student, as was the screen in the shot below, a shelf that twins this one (if anyone cares at all, the shelf would be sequenced between shelves 10 and 11).

Book Shelves #19, 5.06.2012

May 6, 2012May 2, 2012 Biblioklept5 Comments

Book shelves series #19, nineteenth Sunday of 2012.

When I started this project, this shelf was all Tolkien and Joyce; now it’s mostly Gaddis and Joyce.

I have dupes of most of the Joyce books here; there’s also Joyce criticism/guides on the shelf.

Another angle. Glare is horrible. iPhone is not a good camera; lots of glare; shelf is much taller than me, etc.:

Here’s a tight shot of the Brownie Six-16 that serves as bookend:

Something from Finnegans Wake :

Book Shelves #17, 4.22.2012

April 22, 2012April 22, 2012 Biblioklept4 Comments

Book shelves series #17, seventeenth Sunday of 2012.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Camus, Nabokov, Celine, Kafka.

Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones with Revere movie camera as bookend. Littell’s lurid, bizarre book is only shelved here temporarily (he’s in too-rarefied company, perhaps).

A friend gave me this in high school.

Book Shelves #16, 4.15.2012

April 15, 2012April 15, 2012 Biblioklept1 Comment

Book shelves series #16, sixteenth Sunday of 2012.

It’s hard to photograph books, and using an iPhone 3gs probably doesn’t help. Lots of glare. Anyway: This shelf houses mostly Melville, with some Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman, as well as some critical works on the American Renaissance movement. (Henry James and F.O. Matthiessen). I have other versions of a lot of these books, including a fraternal twin in my office, a bit bulkier (Emerson, Dickinson, Thoreau, etc.), although these days I’m apt to go to the Kindle for American Renaissance stuff. Here’s a better angle, perhaps:

The version of Typee is bizarre: no colophon, no publisher info, just text. I love these midcentury Rinehart Editions of Hathorne and Melville stuff:

Book Shelves #15, 4.08.2012

April 8, 2012April 7, 2012 Biblioklept1 Comment

1st Gent. How class your man? – as better than the most,

Or, seeming better, worse beneath that cloak?

As saint or knave, pilgrim or hypocrite?

2nd Gent. Nay, tell me how you class your wealth of books

The drifted relics of all time.

As well sort them at once by size and livery:

Vellum, tall copies, and the common calf

Will hardly cover more diversity

Than all your labels cunningly devised

To class your unread authors.

—George Eliot, Middlemarch, epigraph to Chapter 13

Book shelves series #15, fifteenth Sunday of 2012

A new book-case this week; the shorter triplet of the twin ladders seen here. What do the volumes on this top shelf hold in common? They are hardback. That’s about it. Yes, I actually go through The Riverside Shakespeare every now and then, especially when sparking new ideas for class lectures. The Balthus memoir is pretty good. No, I never finished Godel, Escher, Bach. It’s not hardback, come to think of it. The Fallada books are good stuff. Will Dylan ever finish up the Chronicles? Probably not. Maybe so. Who knows? We all love Shel Silverstein, of course.

Book Shelves #11, 3.11.2012

March 11, 2012March 10, 2012 Biblioklept10 Comments

Book shelves series #11, eleventh Sunday of 2012. DeLillo, Denis Johnson, Pynchon (no, I have not read Against the Day nor finished Mason & Dixon). There’s also a hardback copy of Bolaño’s Between Parentheses; I have an ARC of the same shelved with the other Bolaños, which are on the shelf under—but the finished copy won’t fit on the shelf and it fits here. For now.

Book Shelves #9, 2.26.2012

February 26, 2012February 26, 2012 Biblioklept1 Comment

We should first of all distinguish stable classifications from provisional ones. Stable classifications are those which, in principle, you continue to respect; provisional classifications are those supposed to last only a few days, the time it takes for a book to discover, or rediscover, its definitive place. This may be a book recently acquired and not read yet, or else a book recently read that you don’t quite know where to place and which you have promised to yourself you will put away on the occasion of a forthcoming ‘great arranging’, or else a book whose reading has been interrupted and that you don’t to classify before taking it up again and finishing it, or else a book you have used constantly over a given period, or else a book you have taken down to look up a piece of information or a reference and which you haven’t yet put back in its place, or else a book that you can’t put back in its place, or else a book that you can’t put back in its rightful place because it doesn’t belong to you and you’ve several times promised to give it back, etc.

—Georges Perec, from “The Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books”

Book shelves series #9, ninth Sunday of 2012: In which I photograph three book shelves that I will examine more closely over the next several weeks.

Georges Perec goes on to admit that over three-quarters of his own books are provisionally categorized (at best). Libraries, like governments and tectonic plates and personalities, are not stable entities. Still, most of us try to impose some sense of order on our book collection, even if it’s an order apparent and relevant to ourselves alone. The three book shelves photographed below are probably the most “stable” in the house:

Despite an ongoing process of accretion, relocation, and removal, these shelves tend to remain fairly constant, with minor rearrangements happening maybe monthly instead of weekly or daily. As of today, there’s only one slim piece of a shelf “free”—that is, holding unsorted books waiting to be read, shelved, or, in one case, reviewed (I swear I’ll make another stab at writing up Breece D’J Pancake one day . . .). These books will be elsewhere by the time I get to photographing the shelf they rest on now:

Book Shelves #8, 2.19.2012

February 19, 2012February 19, 2012 Biblioklept1 Comment

Book shelves series #8, eighth Sunday of 2012. This is likely the most boring post in this series (at least I hope it is). I keep books that folks send me that I intend to review but haven’t gotten to yet in this magazine stand thing; it abuts the sofa in the sitting room. Some of the books in here came in last summer. So, out of shame alone, I won’t be yanking any out for individual pics. Next week, we’ll get a gander at some of the finer shelves in the house.

Book Shelves #7, 2.12.2012

February 12, 2012February 11, 2012 Biblioklept1 Comment

Book shelves series #7, seventh Sunday of 2012: In which I photograph a coffee table.

We have three coffee tables. This is one of them (it’s next to the unit I photographed last week). Like many folks’ coffee tables, I suppose, it gets littered with books; the books on this one tend to rotate. Pictured above: lots of recent books acquired, including the Aira on top and Stuart Kendall’s new translation of Gilgamesh. There’s also the new issue of Lapham’s Quarterly and, for some reason (can’t remember) George Saunders’s Pastoralia. The Kindle is also there: my daughter and I read the first three comics in a colorized version of Jeff Smith’s epic graphic novel Bone—amazing stuff, and the color adds depth and beauty to an already beautiful book. I took this photo on a Friday afternoon, or maybe Friday evening (or night). I was drinking wine.

The big book is Walton Ford’s Pancha Tantra, which my lovely wife gave me for Christmas. Some images:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: