Books of course are my passion. Reading is probably my biggest love. Even more so than writing in a sense. Books were with me before I could write as people read to me and I learned to read.

I, however, don’t have a lot of the books I grew up with. Partially because I didn’t own a lot of books. We were a library family, but also because after divorces (parental), moves (theirs and my own), and the love of a good yard sale have helped me to move books in and out of my life.

But, I’ve always had to have at least one book case where ever I’ve lived. Now my house finally has more of the apperance that a booklove truly lives in it.

This first photo is of the two bookcases in my bedroom. I had one on each side of a double window with a bench that one of my husband’s friends had made for us. When those shelves would fill up I would make myself get rid of books I just didn’t love but only liked. (Granted I also had some books hidden under the bench, under the bed and in other places!)

My system of book storage had expanded some after I went back to Graduate school. I don’t have a picture of it but I redid the dining area into “my office” which means I have some nice reading chairs and a large box where I keep all the books I haven’t read yet.

But finally, I am able to even move beyond that. I’ve now taken this empty area at the end of the hallway where there used to just be a cheap Target storage unit (but it stayed there for so long because without planning it, it fit so perfectly) and turned it into a wall of shelves.

My husband made the shelves out of MDF and hung the brackets. I painted the shelves and then had to go through the process of deciding how I was going to orgainze everything. I decided I would move away from my arbitrary system of “oh this shelf is sci-fi and this one is poetry and well this is just books that happen to fit on this shelf and no other shelf” into alphabatizing them. A-J are on the new unit along with Poetry Lit Mags and anthologies. K-Z are in the bedroom, mainly because I had a lot of K’s and a lot of R’s.

Some fun things to note about the new shelves from top to bottom are toys we brought back from trips to major cities around the world. On the left near the bottom is Dot’s Poetry Corner (anyone else remember Animaniacs) and over to the right you might note some copies of INCH and below that one of my favorite childhood books (this isn’t my copy I had to buy one at a used store as an adult) “The Monster at the End of the Book.”

Ah, I just love my books!