The Bookcase Meme

Over at Diana Peterfreund's blog, I volunteered to participate in The Bookcase Meme. (*shrug* It's a slow day, and I love talking about my books.) She was tagged and given the task to provide a detailed commentary about her bookshelves - what's on them, etc. So here I go...

Sitting here at my desk, I have a tiny bookshelf behind me - the bookshelf and most of its contents were passed down to me by my mother. The top shelf has a complete set of 1957 Encyclopedias, which my parents purchased just before the birth of their first child, and which I used throughout my pre-college education. (Imagine using encyclopedias printed before man walked on the moon, and you'll understand why my research papers in school weren't so great.) Below those are the textbooks my daughter is using for this term in homeschool.

Moving to the north, we have the dining area and its gargantuan bookcase. The top two shelves are strictly devoted to my oldest and rarest books. (The grandfather of which is a rare volume by Dumas dating back to the late 1800s.) The remaining four shelves have textbooks leftover from both mine and my husband's college years, as well as any textbooks I might be able to use to teach my daughter.

Shifting into the living room, we find another bookcase with old and rare books, plus some decorative things and knickknacks. It houses my husband's complete set of ancient engineering books. (Okay, not ancient, but really really old.)

Beyond that, in the back foyer, is my shelf devoted to non-fiction and philosophy. We've run out of regular shelf space on that one, so I commandeered the top of it and fashioned some bookends out of cut glass vases. On the top sits our collection of Ayn Rand's novels and non-fiction. The next two shelves are biographical mixed with philosophical and comedic - Robert Fulghum sits with Bill O'Reilly and Carol Burnett, while Kant and Sartre pester the heck out of Aristotle. Actually, this entire shelf has no real organization to it, other than being primarily non-fiction. I have books on birds, cars, finance, history... all lumped together depending on which shelf they fit on.

Moving past the living room, we hit the back hallway. That sucker is full - lined with some of my fiction books. I've tried to keep by books in alphabetical order by author's last name, and these shelves are pretty organized, except for the books lying on shelves waiting for me to find more room. I have everything from Alcott to Zimmer-Bradley. This is also another case of commandeering the tops of the bookshelves, and I've got my poetry and plays wedged nicely between an actual bookend on one side and a boxed set of Thoreau on the other.

Finally, though, we hit the spare room. This is my literary disaster area. I have books shoved into every available space on three bookshelves. One shelf is paperbacks - SF, Literature, romance, thriller... You name the genre, I've probably got it in there somewhere. The poor paperbacks are stacked - two stacks deep - from top to bottom. Another shelf holds any non-fiction that wouldn't fit in the foyer, plus it's got my audiobooks and a few miscellaneous volumes I couldn't stick anywhere else. My last shelf in this room is filled, floor to ceiling with any fiction that wouldn't fit in the hall.

Those are my books. If I went into my daughter's area in the spare room, or into her bedroom, I'd be here all day.

Anyone else game to try the meme? Like Diana, I tag the first three people to volunteer.