I thought I’d try something different for August, and make my Monday post part of the Book Blogger Hop organised by Coffee Addicted Writer.  Each week there is a different question posed, and bloggers answer it, and link up to form a blog hop.  So after you comment here, go and hop round one of the other blogs on the linky!

This week’s question (from Elizabeth):

How many bookcases do you have, and how do you organise the shelves?

I have two tall bookcases either side of my fireplace, which I bought when I moved into this house seven years ago.  If you’ve ever moved you’ll know the pain of sifting through your books wondering if you can really justify keeping them at the new place.  I know I got rid of some books (to my nieces or to charity shops) that I wish I’d kept, but these bookcases quickly fill up again.  They both have what I would call “work-related’ books, from my previous careers, since some are so interesting they come in useful at other times too – Charles Handy’s “The Empty Raincoat” springs to mind.  I have a lot of books on climate change, transition theory, the Gaia principle, history of science, the built environment, sustainability and energy efficiency on the top two shelves on either side.

On the left side, working down, I have a shelf of Harry Potters in four languages (I struggle with the German ones) and my own ones, then biography – mainly horse biography – and below that I have a shelf for taller books which includes my University text books and primers, and other oversized books.  These text books tend to be my Earth Science ones, and are particularly useful for checking my scifi stuff – Earth Science included planetary science and oceanography.  Below that come  my treasured children’s books, ones I’ve carried round with me (or stored in my parents’ loft for a while) , and on the bottom shelves are paperbacks I don’t want to throw out, and may re-read, but they are less important to me.

On the other side after the work-related  stuff come the bird and gardening books.  I have quite a lot of bird research books, bird atlases and the like, and a range of gardening books, mostly to do with organic vegetable gardening.  I also have some exploration of Antarctica books and my selection of Empire Flying Boat books.

Below that come my Encyclopedia set which we had when I was a kid.  It’s way out of date but it’s really good for a historical view of all sorts of things.  Then there are reference books like dictionaries, Shakespeare etc.  Below that I have more fiction books, mostly on this side they are the newer books, and ones I like to re-read, including my set of O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturan novels, my Anne MacCaffreys, and my Lindsey Davies Falco novels.  Below that are others that I’d like to keep but aren’t too important to me.

I have a half-height bookcase in the same room stuffed with natural history books, guides and keys (for identification of birds of different countries, bugs, butterflies, dragonflies and flora etc).  It also has my stock of travel guides, and a load of ordnance survey maps.

Then in my living room I have a table of books to be read!  I’m thinking of getting another bookcase to house them in, and since they are all paperbacks, I could get a fairly cheap one to put in a corner ok.

In my spare bedroom there is a bookcase that also has ornaments and photo albums, but also has a shelf of books that guests might enjoy reading.

I’m planning to throw out some of the stuff cluttering my shelves in the room I also use as my office, and then move some of my reference books up here.  One day I might have time to do it, but probably not this year!

I think that’s it!  Oh, no… On a shelf in the kitchen are my cookbooks…

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See what others say!

 

On Bookcases – book blogger hop
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