Kirsten suggested in a comment that I might enjoy facing books so their titles make a sentence or somehow speak with one another.
She said, "There is an artist who does that--check out the Sorted Books project."
I did check it out and thought it was cool, but would be hard to do.
At work this morning, however, I almost immediately saw the opportunity to create a little dialogue between books:
Here I am in the workspace I inherited. (I am NOT lifting that box of books--I am tilting it for the photo. I don't want to wreck my back.)
This area is less of a mess than it was before I worked 10 hours...
The previous book lady used an old grocery cart to move books around. The ergonomics weren't back-friendly--to get books out, you had to lean in and down.
So I commandeered an old, plaid baby buggy (1950–60s?) that had just been donated. Its designer must have kept in mind the strain of lifting baby in and out, over and over. It works great.
Here, below, my buggy is full of books I culled from the shelves, including internet guides from the late-1990s and Color Me Beautiful from the '70s.
They'd been on the shelves for a looooong time.
Below is a fiction shelf after I weeded and rearranged it. You can see (I hope) that I tried to balance displaying recent bestsellers with classics and . . . Eeva? Are you there? I kept that worn New Directions copy of Isherwood's Berlin Stories thinking of you.
She said, "There is an artist who does that--check out the Sorted Books project."
I did check it out and thought it was cool, but would be hard to do.
At work this morning, however, I almost immediately saw the opportunity to create a little dialogue between books:
Here I am in the workspace I inherited. (I am NOT lifting that box of books--I am tilting it for the photo. I don't want to wreck my back.)
This area is less of a mess than it was before I worked 10 hours...
So I commandeered an old, plaid baby buggy (1950–60s?) that had just been donated. Its designer must have kept in mind the strain of lifting baby in and out, over and over. It works great.
Here, below, my buggy is full of books I culled from the shelves, including internet guides from the late-1990s and Color Me Beautiful from the '70s.
They'd been on the shelves for a looooong time.
Below is a fiction shelf after I weeded and rearranged it. You can see (I hope) that I tried to balance displaying recent bestsellers with classics and . . . Eeva? Are you there? I kept that worn New Directions copy of Isherwood's Berlin Stories thinking of you.
I don't think I'll have time, but it'd be fun to add "shelf-talkers"--notes attached the shelves, with things like staff mini-reviews.
I could put The Economist's verdict on Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard:
"An unsubtle saga, atrociously written, windy and out of control."
These bookshelves are crappy pressboard, inherited from a video store, with nonadjustable shelves. I'd love to get new [donated] shelves, or at least
paint over the sloppy spray-painting of these.
But first things first:
the next step is to fill in the shelves with some of the many books in waiting.
