Book shelves series #51, fifty-first Sunday of 2012
I am very ready for this project to be over. Two more weeks.
At this point, I’ve photographed all book shelves (and other bookbearing surfaces) in the house, but clearly the book shelves aren’t stable.
I mean, structurally, sure, they’re stable.
But their content shifts.
So this week (having three weeks left to fill), I go back to a sitting room in the front of the house where I like to read.
Above, resting on this cabinet, some current reading, including the latest DFW collection and Chris Ware’s Building Stories.
Below, a coffee table (first photographed in #7 of this series):
As usual, a few coffee table books, plus several review copies that I need to look at sometime next week:
One of the coffee table books is by Thomas Bernhard:
To the right of the case, a bin of books—mostly review copies that come in that I plan to write more about:
Book shelves series #46, forty-sixth Sunday of 2012
Another double-stacked shelf. This one even has a stack of drifters.
This shelf is at my eye/arm level, and looking at it this way, I see that it gets a lot of shuffling—I can see where I started certain projects for the site.
I can see books that are in line, so to speak, for either proper shelving or for reading.
The mounding stack on the shelf below is a bit out of control, although most of what sits there comes from other places (I kinda sorta wrote about those here).
Below: Unsorted stuff that I’ve been reading of an afternoon:
This is the front stack—books that need proper shelving elsewhere, books that I’ve read (and sometimes reviewed here) in the past few months, or meant to read, or in some other way consulted or read from:
The far right side of the shelf—again, a very mixed bag. I think I originally intended to properly shelf everything here and then got sidetracked:
Moving left:
And here’s what’s behind the front stack—okay, I can see now the edges of an idea I had for shelving; I also see where I just abandoned that idea:
This whole project I blame on an essay by Georges Perec, collected in this one:
This is one of my favorite book covers:
More covers I like from this shelf:
Read Shannon Mattern’s great essay “Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban Margins” (published at Places). From the essay:
These new library projects might seem to emerge from a common culture and uphold a common mission — a flurry of press coverage in late 2011 represented them as a coherent “little library” movement. But in fact they don’t. They have varied aims and politics and assumptions about what a library is and who its publics are; their collections and services differ significantly; and their forms and functions vary from one locality to another. I want to attempt here to identify a loose, and inevitably leaky, typology of “little libraries” — to figure out where they’re coming from, how they relate to existing institutions that perform similar roles, and what impact they’re having on their communities.
The New York Times and dozens of other sources reported yesterday that the University of Texas acquired David Foster Wallace’s papers, including his personal library. The Harry Ransom Center at UT already has lots of Wallace’s stuff up at their site and it’s frankly astounding. There are handwritten pages from Infinite Jest, images from annotated copies of some of Wallace’s novels, including Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree and Don DeLillo’s Players, and pictures of Wallace’s dictionary with words circled like neroli, cete, and suint. Begin exploring Wallace’s archive here.
Biblioklept 