Gifts for Book-lovers and Newbie Writers

Here are some more great Christmas presents for the book lover - this time from The New Yorker*.

I loved the bookcase wallpaper (left - all the ambience, no dusting!) from Spring Designs, and Brian Dettmer's book sculptures. The Book City Jackets are a stylish way of hiding the real title of the book you are reading from the world (so yes, there is a way to read banned books on the LRT!).

The Lovely Rita bookshelves are gorgeous and I want them on my walls.

If it is the newbie-writer in your life that you want to buy a gift for, Margaret Atwood has produced a list of the 10 perfect presents.

One book I have to treat myself to (although it looks as if I'll have to trawl for a second-hand copy) is Mortifications : Writers and their Public Shame compiled by Robin Roberston. Says Atwood :

Everything awful that may happen to you in public has already happened to someone else, almost. Add to the list (I hope not).

(*This link was very kindly forwarded to me by Lydia Chai.)

30 Years of IKEA's Billy!

Do you have, or have you ever had, a Billybookcase from IKEA? (The closest I've ever got, I confess, was going to IKEA London with my sister when she wanted to buy one.) Now the iconic bookcase is celebrating its 30th birthday and Siobhan Toman at the BBC celebrates 30 years of with some fascinating facts :

... a behemoth of the bookcase world. Designed by only the fourth employee for Ikea, 41 million have been sold since 1979. The factory where the bookcases are made knocks out 15 Billys a minute; 3.1 million a year.

Huma Kureishi in the Guardian's Life and Style section talks about how :

... a Billy bookcase is actually very boring: an unassuming, plain, functional, building-block-style bog-standard bookcase

and the pleasure comes with customising it for yourself. Of course the easiest way to customise a bookcase is - with books. Toman ruminates on one of the questions we love to keep coming back to on this blog - what do your bookshelves say about YOU? And I thought we'd covered every possible way of organising books on bookshelves, but in the comments Laurie of London adds a new one :

I try and leave my books arranged in the order I read them. My bookshelves have now taken on diary-like qualities for me - I can look over them and remember where I was, who I was going out with, or what frame of mind I was in when I read certain books.

Sadly though one fact that doesn't get any space in these two pieces is that the factory which has been producing them all this while is about to close. (Lots of photos of Billy bookshelves in use on Flickr.)

Over to You?

Must admit - am feeling a little tired and uninspired at the moment, and am busy with teaching practice observation which has me dashing off to schools all over the city. Time I think to throw things over to you guys - what are you reading and what do you think of it?

I've been in a very nibblish mood lately, reading bits and pieces of things but finding it hard to settle to a whole book. I've been mighty impressed by J.D. Salinger's short stories (my copy is one of Dina Zaman's pre-loved books) . Am also reading - among other stuff - Adeline Lee's short stories and Malaysian Essays 2, and about to embark on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I'm also enjoying a compilation of the short short stories that won the Writers Digest competition last year - my own entry not among them (but now am beginning to understand what they were looking for).

The wonderful bookstairs above were found by Tan Twan Eng At Guagga Art and Books in Cape Town. (The bookstore's site appears to be down at the moment.)

Guide to Arranging Your Bookshelves

I have a friend who arranges his books generically, with each genre bleeding into the next – science into SF; history into historical fiction. It took him days, but he was a happy man by the end of it. In Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, Everything is Illuminated, a girl derides her lover for ordering his books by colour ("How stupid") – but the system retains a small but passionate following. One colleague orders her books according to which authors she feels would be friends in real life – regardless of the centuries that separate them. ... Myself, after a lifetime of experimentation, I find I prefer the fortuities and disjunctions that arise from eschewing arrangement altogether: my books end up on my shelves according to where I can jam them, which has the advantage of cutting down on random acts of borrowing, as only I know where anything is located.

Sarah Crowne considers bookshelf etiquette on The Guardian blog. It's a topic I love and have visited before (e.g.) but never tire of. And John Crace suggests some alternative ways to organise your shelves to express your personality including :

• The literary snob

Old Penguins, heavily creased to denote re-reading, are lined up in rows of orange, black and grey. These can be bought by the yard at most secondhand bookshops, and are a very easy way of acquiring instant intellectual credibility.

• The 'I'm desperate for a shag', male version

Must include prominent copies of The Golden Notebook and The Second Sex and any dreary rubbish by Ian McEwan lying around to show you are in touch with your sensitive side. Best to hide any well-thumbed copies of Belle du Jour and La Vie Sexuelle by Catherine M under the bed.

• The kleptomaniac

Easy. You just arrange your books in accordance with the numbering system of the library from which you nicked them.

Which Books to Keep?

There are two general schools of thought on which books to keep, as I learned once I began swapping stories with friends and acquaintances. The first views the bookshelf as a self-portrait, a reflection of the owner’s intellect, imagination, taste and accomplishments. ... Books become stand-ins for friends and clients.

The other approach views a book collection less as a testimony to the past than as a repository for the future; it’s where you put the books you intend to read. ... At its most pragmatic, and with the aid of technology, this attitude can be breathtakingly ruthless.

There's a very nice piece by Laura Miller in the New York Times on our relationship to our bookshelves and how and when we "cull" our books.

Of course, I'm mostly in the first category. My books are my old friends. They may be a little tatty and a little age-spotty ... but then so am I. And each title reminds me of the time when I read it, and how I came by it. Every time I've tried to cull books it seems, I end up trying to find copies of the same books I gave away! Hopeless!

But given the sheer number of unread books I'm accumulating, my shelves also serve as my reading list for quite some time to come.

Stairway to Heaven?

Running out of space for books? Build your bookcases into the stairs!

This is just a moment to pause and ask you, what are you reading and is it any good?

I've been freewheeling for the last few days - reading magazines and non-fiction (Tim Butcher's excellent Blood River) while working up the energy to plunge back into fiction!

Biblio Bathtime

Sharanya sent me this lovely picture of a biblio-bathtub which she found on Boing-Boing. Designed by Anthonio Lupi, it will set you back a cool US$17,300!

I seldom actually read in the bathtub, and then only magazines I don't mind getting wet, but Alastair Harper on the Guardian blog considers it the height of civilisation.

The Asian bathtime being generally a splash and grab affair, I don't suppose many of you have had a chance to get into the habit, have you?

Perhaps someone should introduce reading spas as the ultimate in relaxation? It isn't half as stupid as the idea of having little fish nibble all the dead bits of skin off your legs! Eyucks!

Returning though to the subject of bookshelves, Lindsay Irvine asks whether our books couldn't be organised a bit more creatively and points the way to a new blog entirely devoted to the subject, just for fetishists (like me!)

Shelfish Reasons

I recognise the symptoms of what BookLust calls Bibliomania, "the best disease bar none" only too well ...

She does rather make things worse though by suggesting a list of guides to book collecting which I know simply must have. Am now running out of shelf space again and a big reshuffle of my shelves is planned which will probably take weeks ... and I dread it, not so much because I hate cleaning (which I do) but because I keep finding old friends on the shelves and have to sit down and read them.

I've acquired a tiny handheld vacuum cleaner which will be just the thing for cleaning the books without realising clouds of dust into the air. It was a free gift from the nice folks at the car workshop after I spent many thousands on repairs to parts of the innards I didn't even know existed. (The money that could have been better spent on antique bookshelves and numerous rare first editions.)

I've noticed that there's nothing bibliomaniacs (that's you guys!) love to talk about more than how they organize their collection. (The idea of organising a book collection by colour prompted a lot of discussion and made me realise just how many different ways there are to organise books ... and how idiosyncratic we all are!)

The topic comes up again today on the Guardian blog where Sarah Crown makes a plea for advice, as she struggles to reshelf her books after a house move:

Believe me, I've tried nearly everything. I used to favour the popular "by genre" approach: different shelves for poetry, plays, fiction, non-fiction, travel, cookery ... The problem there, though, is that the travel shelf ends up only half-full, and then you're faced with the problem of what to complete it with. So you pick cookery, but cookery spills over onto the next shelf ... and so it goes. Even if you decide that, despite its flaws, the genre system is for you, there are further choices to be made. Do you organise each genre alphabetically? Do you attempt the infinitely tricky but profoundly impressive, if you can pull it off, genre-bleed - science into sci-fi, history books into historical fiction?

I enjoyed the reader comments, suggesting all kinds of solutions I would never have thought of, including:

• organising books by the price you paid for them
• putting heavier books at either end of a shelf so they don't warp (invented by an engineer)

If, like Kak Teh the other day, you simply have too many books and need to cull them, why not bookcross them? This is a tad risky in Malaysia where most people don't seem to understand the concept, but you could donate them to the local bookcrossing group or leave them on the bookcrossing shelf at Silverfish. (From which I seem to pick up more titles than I leave, which isn't the point, really.)

There are also a number of bookswapping sites now on the internet and the Librarything blog has done a good job of highlighting these recently, and here's a list of sites they recommend:

• Title Traders
• SwapThing
• Lendmonkey
• Bookins
• Swapsimple
• Bookmooch
• WhatsOnMyBookshelf

I don't mind getting rid of books - but it always seems to be that the books I get rid of seem a little further down the line to be the books I need desperately to refer to ... and I end up buying another copy!

Postscript

Someone added the best suggestion yet on the blog ... arrange your books in dinner-party order i.e. according to which authors would most like to sit by each other. I love that!

The Colour of Books

Do you organize your books by subject? Or do you organise them by subject? Or by size?

Boring!

Organizing them by color transforms them from a banal backdrop into a poppy, rainbow-colored focal point. Books organized by color are cool to look at.

Check out this article from the Design Observer for ideas and lots of pictures to show you how you can colour coordinate your library.

Update:

After reading this post LotusReads actually tried this out in her library and it looks wonderful!

Of Thickie Pariahs and Books By The Yard

Victorian Beckham has never done it in her life.

Neither had Noel Gallagher ... until just recently.

Read a book, that is.

I think there are plenty of people out there who don't read books and who are none the worse for it

says Hester Lacy in today's Guardian:

... it's fine for anyone to confess that they really can't stick shopping; one can even seem quite smug about it. Not so if you aren't keen on books. Reading must be about the only pastime that is pretty much universally seen as "good" and virtuous - so to say openly that you don't like books puts you beyond the pale. For someone to say they don't care for reading labels them as some kind of thickie pariah, fair game for any insult. To decide any such thing on the basis of one single trait seems both sweeping and snobbish.

Meanwhile, concerned to show the world that he certainly isn't (despite popular opinion) a thickie pariah, George tells us what he's taking along as holiday reading . Convinced?

I remember Thor Kah Hong of Skoob Books telling me years ago about how he had customers come into his shop and order books by the yard to complement their home decor and fool vistors.

Update:

Apparently Gerry Adams (Sinn Fein leader) isn't much of a reader either. According to Rober McCrum in The Observer he confided to the New York Times not only that he had never finished Ulysses but didn't know anyone who had. McCrum asks for suggestions for a reading list to rescue Posh from the depths of her own ignorance.