In our wanderings, mine alone in 1950-57, Wendy's and mine in 1957-2010, books had to be accommodated. Book shelves have always been among our most important articles of furniture, as important as our bed and dining table. When I traveled, even just overnight to London from Edinburgh, to Toronto or Washington from Ottawa, I always packed 2 or 3 books as well as a change of underwear and socks. And of course I almost always came home with more books than I had when I set out.
Whenever we came to rest, for example in the sabbatical year in New York, the brief sabbatical in Sydney and Canberra, books accumulated like coat hangers in a closet or paperclips in a desk drawer, or flotsam at the high tide line on a beach. At the end of our year in New York, books occupied a very large part of the rental truck I hired to carry our loot back to Ottawa.
Book shelves proliferated when we settled for a few years, planks on bricks or milk cartons at first, then shelving I installed myself, Ikea shelves and best of all, adjustable metal shelves I bought from the University of Ottawa supplier when we came to rest in Ottawa.
There were never enough shelves, never enough space on bedside tables or other surfaces. When I traveled for 2 month spells as a WHO consultant in Indonesia or India, books made up almost half my luggage by weight. On sea voyages across the world I took along 30-40 books. I'd have loved a Kobo or other electronic reader in those days! Now I can't abide electronic readers, save for my iPad on which the text scrolls rather than moving on one page at a time. The Kobo irritates me because it is so slow changing to the next page - I'm a fast reader and absorb a page of text in less time that I spend waiting for the next page to load and display on the Kobo, so I rarely bother with it, never since I got an iPad.
Storage space for books reached its apogee in our row house on Waverley Street where 12-14 foot ceilings allowed taller book shelves than we had in any other home, and I had a little ladder to reach the top shelves. I never measured the amount of shelf space in the Waverley Street row house. It must have been at least 18 meters more than I had in the cottage on Echo Drive because when we moved to Echo Drive, the tall set of homemade shelves that my colleague Ian McDowell helped me to make didn't come with us. They were too tall to accommodate anywhere in that low ceilinged home, where I did measure: I had 74 meters of shelf space in the Echo Drive cottage, had to reduce to 21 meters when we moved into the apartment where I live now. Fortunately our children and grandchildren love books too, so many I had to discard found a welcome elsewhere in the family. But I had to sell or give away many others, and I miss them dreadfully. I had another 24 meters of shelves installed under the picture windows in my apartment, and of course filled them instantly. Next perhaps I'll put some shelves in the bedroom...
What have I got on these shelves? The glass-fronted antique break-front has a few very old books from the early 19th century, including Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, some valuable facsimile editions of works on Australian exploration, miscellaneous works on ancient, medieval and modern history, travel and exploration and some modern first editions. There are more of these in the revolving shelves Rebecca had built for me, and in the shelves in the dining room and under the picture windows. Mainly though, I just have a miscellaneous collection of paperbacks, non-fiction, history, fiction, you name it.
 |
| Breakfront glass shelves |
 |
| Office south wall |
 |
| Office east and south walls |
 |
| Revolving shelves and room divider |
 |
| Room divider (west side) |
 |
| Right bedside table |
 |
| Left Bedside table |
 |
| Room divider east side |
 |
| Dining room |
 |
| Lobby |
 |
| Shelves below western picture windows |
Here are some photos of the shelves in my apartment. Even the bedside tables have become additional improvised book shelves.
No comments:
Post a Comment