bookshelfs – T E Shepherd https://shepline.com author | illustrator | digital designer Sat, 06 Apr 2013 16:45:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.4 https://shepline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/cropped-shepline-white-on-green-square_512-32x32.jpg bookshelfs – T E Shepherd https://shepline.com 32 32 The Secret Life of Books https://shepline.com/2012/01/10/the-secret-life-of-books/ https://shepline.com/2012/01/10/the-secret-life-of-books/#respond Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:17:00 +0000 http://journal.shepline.com/?p=1970 Ever wondered what books get up to when left unattended in a bookshop after hours…?

…and this, the video that inspired them to make the follow up. Love it!

]]> https://shepline.com/2012/01/10/the-secret-life-of-books/feed/ 0 On the fifteenth day of advent: librarianship in the home https://shepline.com/2011/12/15/on-the-fifteenth-day-of-advent-librarianship-in-the-home/ https://shepline.com/2011/12/15/on-the-fifteenth-day-of-advent-librarianship-in-the-home/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:24:00 +0000 http://journal.shepline.com/?p=1917 Following on from an interesting article on the importance of of organising one’s bookshelves in today’s Guardian, apparently Alexander McCall Smith kicked up a storm on Twitter yesterday about it, it made me consider how I used to, and how I now, organise the books in my home.

Firstly, books make a home. I cannot imagine a home without books and feel somewhat disconcerted when I visit or hear about one which does not have any books. The books in question don’t have to be great works, or literary masterpieces, but they do need to be present, in much the same way as walls should have pictures to be truly complete.

When I was young I would arrange my books by size, shape and colour with a supplementary sorting system of favourite books to prominent shelves according to artistic sensibilities. In all other cases they were pretty much random.

It has only been in the last decade that I have organised my books alphabetically by author in the following genre groupings:

  • children’s fiction (my biggest category
  • fiction
  • poetry
  • plays and drama
  • cooking/gardening
  • large format
  • TBR – this is the shelf for newly purchased books however there are other ‘TBR’ books elsewhere on the shelves
  • reference (this is not so finely sorted alphabetically)
  • out-size childrens illustrated

That is the basics of how my books are organised. How do you organise yours?

]]> https://shepline.com/2011/12/15/on-the-fifteenth-day-of-advent-librarianship-in-the-home/feed/ 7 A nice man has just got my business https://shepline.com/2008/05/13/a-nice-man-has-just-got-my-business/ https://shepline.com/2008/05/13/a-nice-man-has-just-got-my-business/#respond Tue, 13 May 2008 11:41:00 +0000 http://journal.shepline.com/a-nice-man-has-just-got-my-business/ I’m looking into fitting glass doors to the bottom shelfs of my three bookshelfs. Remembering how the one that I had when I was ‘ickle worked I wanted to do this myself by getting some glass doors cut and then fitting some nice simple plastic track for them to slide on. I’ve been doing sporadic searching on the interweb for various combinations of ‘door track’ to see: a) what its actually known as; b) where you can get it from; and c) how much it might be. You would have thought that in this day and age there would be a diy-type stockist site-thing that would have these sort of things listed.

In the end I got bored of searching, and resigned myself to trying my luck at Homebase in the knowledge that I wouldn’t find the thing I was after and the member of staff that I would find wandering the aisles wouldn’t understand what I was after, and when I had explained it to them would announce that they don’t stock anything like it…

…so instead I persued the glass.

This is where I searched the yellow pages and came up against a company called Bicester Glass – glass while’u’wait amongst other more trade solutions. This sounds exactly what I’m after, I thought, and gave them a call. And what a nice man I spoke to. He knew exactly what I was after and was able to give me aproximate prices for my (very) approximate guesswork dimensions, and knew exactly what I needed/wanted for the track (down to bigger at the top than at the bottom so that you can lift the door up and dop it back down into the track. The prices are reasonable. He’s definitely getting my business.

Good, old-fashioned customer service does still exist, oh yeah! 🙂

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