Sunday, February 17, 2013

Kelly discusses the art of bookshelves

Bookshelves. Where would we be without them?! Personally, without my shelves, I'd be drowning in a sea of books scattered all over the floor. I like to arrange my shelves by genre, though I know some of you are dedicated enough to go by author as well. Bookshelves are not just a place to store and keep track of our books, but they're also a place to possibly let our creativity shine. I've seen a lot of fun ideas on pinterest recently and decided to share some of the most fun bookshelves I've come across. I'm a big fan of any shelf big enough to need a ladder to get to the top of.

As serious readers, most of us will agree that practicality outweighs design/cleverness. A lot of the shelves in the pictures below look cool, but can only fit a few books on them. This is not an ideal situation for book hoarders! So, which shelves are your favorites? Do you have any pinterest-worthy shelves of your own? How do you organize your bookshelf? Are they like mine and about to snap in half from the weight?






15 comments:

  1. I love pictures of bookshelves. I honestly can't get enough of all the pretty! And I wish I had cool shelves like that, but nope, I will have to stick to my Ikea ones until I find any of those. And HA, I tried organizing my shelves, but um... something went wrong in the middle of the process and they're a mess. But as long as there's books, I don't mind :D

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  2. I love interesting bookshelves! That tree-shaped one is amazing, and I really like the one shaped like a map of the US, too. At the moment I just have one bookshelf with some of my favourite books on, plus the ones I've acquired most recently - the rest of my books are at my mum's house and have been for a few years now. I can't wait 'til I can have my own space and bring all my books back together :)

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  3. I love looking at these as well ;) And yeah, being able to store more books in them will pretty much always outweigh the coolness factor these have. If only I was a little bit of a book hoarder instead of just BUYING THEM ALL. Oh well :)
    I love, love, LOVE the one that's an extra floor in the living room, that'd be AWESOME!
    My system is a combination of sorted by date I got them and put them where they will fit...

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  4. There's actually a book all about bookshelves that I saw at a bookstore recently. It was beautiful. Are you on the Bookshelf Porn website at all? It's filled with bookshelves!!! (NOT porn! It's "porn" for book lovers)

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    1. Ha ha - I JUST saw this - I posted about bookshelf porn below with the same disclaimer.

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  5. Mine are arranged by colour. I cant stand to have them arranged by author or genre because they don't look right. I like the top one on the right - lots of room for books with that one!

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  6. I love great bookshelves, but as you said practicality trumps everything. We have 4 Billy bookshelves with extenders from Ikea and I'm not sure how long those will suffice!

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  7. You ought to check out http://bookshelfporn.com. (It's not real porn - I PROMISE - it's a tumblr with nothing but pictures of bookshelves.) On a cleaner note, my granddad's bedroom has two walls that are floor to ceiling bookshelves (my love for reading is genetic - I'm sure of it). That's my dream room!

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  8. My favorite that I've seen on interest is the floating book bookshelves. Basically, you take an old book and glue a metal L-shaped piece to the inside back cover and then screw the other part of the L into the wall. After that, you can stack all your books atop it and they just look like they're floating.
    Of course, I organize mine by genre and author, so this may cause some organizational difficulties, but I do really want to try it out. We'll have to see if I ever get around to it.

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  9. I think a focal point bookcase in one room is a great idea as long as you have another room with floor to ceiling storage with room for thousands of books ;) I love the tree one.

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  10. I love the third one (the loft)! Ideally, I'd want to build a house rather than buy, so that I can incorporate bookshelves into all the non-support inner walls/sides of stairs/etc. Basically anywhere there's empty wall space, haha.

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  11. I love the creative bookshelves, the ones that look really cool, but they're just not practical if you have a lot of books. We have bookshelves in every room except the bathrooms, and more in the basement. I arrange my books by genre and more-or-less by author within that -- but paperbacks and hardcovers are often separated, even in separate rooms, because some of my shelves don't work for hardcovers.

    I've been collecting pictures of cool bookshelves and lust-worthy libraries on one of my Pinterest boards. It's addictive!

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  12. I love looking at bookshelves on Pinterest. Some of them are incredibly creative and different. But I am definitely one who goes for practicality. I have two large bookshelves that are organized first by genre or topic and then by author (I'm a bit OCD). And when there aren't any book on the shelves and you look at the middle of each shelf... they are definitely bending downwards and I am afraid that one day they will collapse!

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  13. Oh I'm moving soon and this just gave me so many wonderful (if perhaps expensive) ideas!

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  14. As much as I would love to have a bookshelf like the tree one or the one that looks like it has collapsed, I really want a full wall shelving unit, filled to the brim with books! I'm moving soon so hopefully I can get that in my new bedroom... ooh makes me excited just thinking how I could arrange my books!

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