What does your bookcase say about you?

[lyrasilver]

Maybe I should ask what do you want it to say about you! Mine is in the kitchen and a quick look at the books currently residing there ... thrillers, mainly american authors and quite grusome, some scifi/ fantasy Stephen Donaldson, Eddings,Iain Banks, and loads of Stephen King for light relief. Bottom shelf cookery books and childrens books.
Not sure what it says apart from I like cooking, I have children andenjoy the dark side of fiction.

Purlease....No I did not know that, why was it named after her... please dont say she was the editors new born daughter! I feel old enough!

Ha! just googled it... urban legend. She was working there but denies Jackie was named after her!

she was only young at the time (6-17), but she was working for DC comics a writer and they named it after her.

oh no In thought it was true! here

Our 15 bookcases say that we are hoarders that find it almost impossible to throw anything away.

The extra books piled up on the floor in the spare room add to this impression.

(They'd be right )

Which bookcase?

Kitchen: some cookbooks, nowt special.

Living-room: dh's manly-intelligentsia-foreign-fiction-in-translation hardbacks [epitomised by Elias Canetti, if not immediately obvious]; a whole lot of orderly yellowing Grantas; my scholarly books which are not secondary texts; a batch of travel items.

The bit off the living-room which is called "my study": some sci-fi and scholarly secondary texts; Shakespeare and some shelves of dh's cahiers de Chinese pottery.

My side of the bed: collapsing pile of LRBs.

Dh's side: slim vols of poetry got off Abebooks cheaply. A contemp novel or two.

Elsewhere in our room: contemporary fiction we've decided worth having close by (David Mitchell eg).

Ds's room: Dr Who, Molesworth, tomes about maths & science, & Mark Haddon's books.

Dd's room: fairy books, Tintin, Asterix, Noel Streatfield, Diana Wynne-Jones, the Borrowers, Dodie Smith, all those classics. (Dd is the biggest reader of us all.)

Dh's attic study: dead serious art books, our cosily compounded adolescent sets of Penguin modern classics, in that nice muted paste-green binding; sci-fi with appalling foiled cover styling.

Overall message: books, yeh, we do books. And you?

My Stephen King stash in the pantry says that dp is a meanie who won't let me have them on display (he claims it's cos they are too big to fit on the shelves).

My cookery books on the kitchen windowsills say that I have too many; the fact that most of them are in such good condition says that I still continue to ignore the recipes and cook the same old stuff.

The poetry and drama books in the living room suggest that somebody in the house read English lit at uni. The paucity of Thomas Hardy books suggests that dp and I have just agreed that we are never likely to read him again and have had a trip to the charity shop.

The multiple copies of Jane Austen suggest that you can't have too much of a good thing!

7 bookcases here...
My books take up 5 of these,mainly crime and thrillers,spy fiction especially wartime stuff,some contemporary fiction,historical,a few horror.
Non fiction is mainly historical biography,fashion,history.
None of my bookcases are particularly tidy and all have excess stock piled all over!

I have just counted bookcases and I don't think I can admit to the number. Suffice to say there is even one in the bathroom.

They say no one in this family can walk past a bookshop or leave one empty-handed.

The other day a visitor said: "I see you never get rid of any of your books," but we cull the unloved and the duplicates every year!

ours say we have a ridiculous amount of books
we brought 60 large boves of them or something when we moved to NZ, took up a lot of our container. And yet still we buy them....

Lyra, I heard her being interviewed on Comics Britannia which was on TV recently (as in a few months ago). She used to work in the publishing company and she said that they decided to call the magazine after her. She has clearly changed her story.

Or it may have all been a dream...

here

squeaver - it was only last year that I finally got rid of my copy of Sweet's Anglo Saxon primer! I finished my degree in 1986!

Purlease... she needs to pick a story and stick to it!
My mate is getting work done in his house and has culled his ' book room'.... anyone got a home for 1000 books... cos they are not coming here, well maybe one or two of them!

Dh would take them like a shot but I need to maintain some control. Book culls don't happen in our house.

Sixspot. Have just had another look and have decided the wankiest one I have up there is Deconstruction: Theory & Practice. It's got underlinings and notes in the margin and everything!

Lyra - I too have an extensive collection of Oor Wullie and Broons books and will never throw them out.

Someone said earlier that they pass on their books immediately when they have more than half a dozen or so .....I would love to be able r=to do that but I know I would panic!!

How do you know when a Georgette Heyer/terry Pratchett/Nora Roberts emergency may arise? Or a Sci-Fi/Fantasy be the only thing you could possibly read? Or if 3 Men in a Boat is the only thing that could make you laugh?

Or you need to know which poem says exactly what you need to say Now?

Our main bookcases are in a family room in our attic, and in our bedrooms so visitors to our house probably think we don't read at all (I even have all my cookbooks in a cupboard)

Or they think we only read in the toilet where a pile of our books are normally to be found lying scattered on the floor...

We have one small bookshelf in our living/dining room which has hardback artbooks, a couple of hardback history books and an atlas. It is a minimalist bookshelf if you will .