Those shelves, redux

Sorry posting has been so haphazard of late... and thank you for your lovely messages about Lylah. The funeral was a perfect send-off, and she'd have been very pleased. But - as a lady who listed, in an interview she once did for the local paper, her greatest extravagance as 'books' - she'd be very happy for us to move onto that most excellent of extravagances...

You might remember what my shelves looked like the other day... Well, now everything is in place and there's even a little bit of room for more. Don't try and compare photos too closely, because I madly decided to change everything around again - so the books didn't have chance to settle down before they were up and moving again.

I know book-organisation is something most of us are interested in (which is a mystery to many of my friends, who just cram their books onto shelves without any sense of order. Not that the arbitrary method is necessarily bad - viz. Howards End is on the Landing, which I've just started rereading - but it only really counts if it's a conscious decision... the sort of decision non-bibliophiles wouldn't even consider. Mine are done thematically, and then alphabetically within that... sort of. Some are just in height order...

Bookshelves (1.)


Need you ask about the first one and a half shelves? All my lovely Persephone Books. And it made sense to follow them up with Virago books... and the rest of these shelves are taken up with what I call 'doveish' books - i.e. they correspond to the undefinable but unmistakable tastes of the dovegreybooks online reading group (not to be confused with dovegreyreader - we came first!) Oh, except for the bottom shelf, which is, er, books which would fit onto a small shelf... and books I've read which I'm waiting to blog about. And Jane Austen, and Mapp and Lucia.

Oh, and the bottom shelf is for books I'm currently reading (supposedly).

Bookshelves (2.)


Top shelf: diaries and notebooks; SPACE FOR MORE BOOKS!
2nd shelf: Christian books; Those which I'm calling 'other' - mostly post-1960 novels, and those which didn't fit in anywhere else
3rd shelf: Books relating to my research; library books (some crossover here!)
And then CDs, which aren't of interest here...

Bookshelves (3.)


Top shelf: Virginia Woolf (primary)
2nd shelf: Virginia Woolf (secondary); Bloomsbury and other similar books (Katherine Mansfield, Roger Fry, etc.)
3rd shelf: Books to Read Soon. This incorporates my Must Read Soon, Must Read Very Soon, and Must Read Immediately shelves from the previous house... These should be in some sort of order, but currently they're not.
4th & 5th shelves: books waiting to be reviewed. And some which should be on the 6th shelf...
6th shelf: Non-fiction, literary theory, diaries, letters, that sort of thing...

So, there we are! They'll probably all be rearranged at some point, but I'm quite happy with it for now... and, of course, at the moment books aren't scattered across every remaining surface. This will, naturally, change.