I saw a piece in the newspaper yesterday about decorating one's home with books. This is nothing new here -- I have no real decorating scheme and no money with which to decorate, but since we do love to read, our scheme, by default, is "Early Literate."
But the article -- oh, the article! I thought I was deep in The Onion territory when I read about a decorator's clients, all of whom seem to have built enormous homes with formal libraries and yet they "have no books" to line the shelves. Her job, therefore, is to find the right color and type of binding to create the look they desire.
I guess the alternative would be to buy some books in which one is interested, read them, and then store them on one's bookshelves. But that would definitely take more time and drag out the whole decorating project.
Oh. My.
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Also in literary news, I saw in the March issue of The Writer that The Paris Review now has all of their author interviews online, dating back to the '50s.
Oh, my, again. How am I going to get anything else done this week?
And also? This isn't really literary news. We'll call it decorating news, just like Item #1 in this post, as I intend to paper my walls with pages from The Writer, thus creating the look of one who actually writes. Or reads about writing. Or thinks about reading. Or likes the color of the pages. Or something.
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I realized the other day that I hadn't read The Weight of a Mass with Ramona for the longest time. We snuggled up, read, and she adored it. Again. We also love Josephine Nobisso's Take It to the Queen. I even included a couple of quotes from that one in my Through the Year With Mary book (which Josephine was kind enough to endorse.)
If you haven't read Josephine's books, check them all out at Gingerbread House Publishing.
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Speaking of books, I wrote a chapter for a new book that Servant will publish next month. Atheist to Catholic: 11 Stories of Conversion, edited by Rebecca Vitz Cherico, should be available around mid-March. More on that coming soon.
8 comments:
Beautiful houses with tons of built-in shelves and no books, just knick-knacks, make me sad. While we have books 2 layers deep on the shelves!
As much work as book designers go through to make covers it always strikes me as strange to see designed homes with color-accented book covers. That's ... so very odd.
Meanwhile, the Gingerbread Books are very interesting looking. I hadn't realized that anyone had every explained Catholicism kind of in children's book form. Take it to the Queen is obviously about Mary, yes? Interesting.
I read that first part to my daughter, who very accurately commented, " that's just weird."
:o)
Going to go check out those books...
Onion territory indeed!
And here some of us are looking at our blooming progeny and contemplating having to make more room for kids by displacing the office full of books....
A friend gave us The Weight of a Mass and Take it to the Queen for Christmas. (They were on my wishlist after I read The Weight of a Mass at my sister-in-law's house but this friend just picked them up cause she thought I'd like them.) They are truly beautiful stories; I'm so glad to finally own them. Bella and I just read Take it to the Queen again today at nap time. Such a perfect little fable.
I know what you mean, Sara! Never enough shelving!
Tanita, yes, Take It to the Queen is a lovely tale about Mary, and the illustrator (Katalin Szegedi does such beautiful work. Here's a post I did awhile back when I reviewed the book.
Sue, you will love the books, I'm sure, and Melanie, what fun that you received them as gifts.
Karen,
I remember reading an article once on the whole concept of decorating with books that went even further. It described designers who would buy books from book dealers BY THE FOOT. Yes, they needed 3 feet of red bindings and 4 feet of green bindings...
The only criteria was the "look" of the spines as they would show on the shelf.
This was (and is) so absurd to us. We are so counter-cultural in our suburban neighborhood that we closed our built-in garage to build a library. Rows and rows of tall shelves -- and we still have bookshelves in every bedroom and the family room...
When my daughter at a new friend over the other day, she mentioned that something was in the "library." That stumped her friend -- thinking she meant the town library.
Now if we could just keep the collecting spots on the way clear, we could actually let other people IN the library once in a while....
I thought, reading the "book decorating" bit, about a movie I've seen and started to comment about it, but it got a bit long for the combox. I just posted it at my blog instead.
Yeah, we need more shelves, too--especially if we keep buying up the authors and book recs of the blogs we frequent! :-) Keep 'em coming!
Never, ever, ever enough bookshelves. Even with most of the children's books in boxes in the attic (slowly making their descent into the main living area with the advent of a book loving granddaughter), we didn't have enough bookshelves. Even with the homeschool books all boxed up in the attic, we don't have enough bookshelves. Even with me making frequent trips to Annie's to dispose of paperbacks I don't want anymore, and having given away boxes and boxes to the library sale, we still don't have enough bookshelves. The idea of having lots of bookshelves and no way to fill them, is a totally foreign concept. Of course, I was once told by a local book seller that it was people like me who kept him in business. He was a Protestant bookseller, and I have to admit he went out of business shortly after I became Catholic. Surely, it was a coincidence... My husband frequently warns me that the house is apt to collapse from the weight of the books.
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