Bibliophile

I'm a confirmed Bibliophile - I have books stacked all over the house, and a few boxes of them in my garage too. Besides my collection of 120+ Reader's Digest Condensed books (thanks to 2nd hand sales), there's kid's books, religion books, 2 huge boxes of magazines, encyclopedia-type books, story books, ancient books inherited from my parents when they moved, music books (music scores), fiction books... Well, just about anything you could imagine.

And I think I've decided what to do with all that chipboard I "rescued" from behind the mall over the weekend. I need bookshelves!

Not the conventional ones though. I'm planning to do a number of "cubes" in various sizes that can be stacked to provide shelf space as needed. They'd be strong enough to support the books without having long shelves that sag in the middle, and I can screw them together if they look like doing a tower-of-Babel effect. Can stack them long or high, depending on space. Nice and cheap, nice and practical.

I've always wanted to do a printer-tray type bookshelf too, but that will have to wait. It would have the "long" shelves vertical, with horizontal shelves at various heights in between. The advantages being you can stack tall books in a tall space, and short books in a short space, and if you have a blank space you can stick in a picture or ornament.

Once I've made my cubes, I can bring down the boxes of books in the garage and see just how much of a library I own.

And even more good news for a bibliophile like me: at lunch today I stopped one of our older lecturers to tell him of my adventures in "divining" this morning (he's always ready to jump into a discussion on ley lines, standing stones, conspiracies etc, so we have some pretty interesting chats). As he was leaving, he said he's throwing out many of his books to get ready for a retirement move, and would I like his books on the strange and unexplained? WOULD I???!!!! Man, that's like taking a kid to a candy store and telling him everything's free!

So even MORE books are on their way to me. I'll be on holiday from mid-next week, and look forward to many hours with my nose stuck between the pages, soaking up things I haven't yet read.

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