My Favorite Mutt

 

If you’ve seen the very first post of this blog, you’ve seen the above picture: it’s the scan of a photo I took years ago at Loop Drive of one of my shelves. Looking at it now, I can see quite a few volumes that are now in the Shadow Library, including this book club edition of Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales that I hadn’t recorded yet. 

Of course, in those days it took real film that cost a bit of real money to make those pictures, and then later a scanner to copy them into jpegs.  Nowadays, if you have the right phone, a good high-resolution picture is basically free and instantaneous. Well, I don’t have the right phone (its camera is very low resolution), but my niece Kelsey does, and after I’d asked her, she’d taken some photos and sent them to me over Facebook in about 10 minutes.

I suppose if I had a dog or a cat, I’d want to post pictures and talk about it all the time. But what I do have is a library. And I’ll be the first to admit that my library is a real mutt.

Part of that is because I’ve been building it for a long time. For example, I bought Terry Pratchett books first from the Science Fiction Book Club (in their rather flimsy editions), then got paperbacks from Del Rey, then Roc, then Harper, then started buying good hardbacks whose cover styles changed over the years. I remember reading a story where a scientist produces a cat that exists simultaneously present at every stage of its life, from kittenhood to a ratty old moggy; it looked rather like an animated furry carrot. If I put all my Pratchett on one shelf, it would be just such a furry carrot.  

I see a lot of people on YouTube, reviewing books and showing off their shelves. They tend to have spiffy uniform editions of series, beautifully uniform shelves, and even strikingly uniform backlighting on those shelves. Some have wonderfully curated curios, many of them not even out of the box. Such libraries, with books that are so carefully cared for that they look unread and are never stacked on top of each other, are obvious thoroughbreds. But I wonder if they are little more than status symbols, and if they can really be as well-loved as my old mutt.

Anyway, here are the pictures we took. These are the main shelves; there are smaller shelves (two that hold up my computer “desk”), some plastic bins, and even drawerfuls of books in dressers. Let's go through them, shall we? You can click on each picture to examine the details.

Now here are some shelves that are actually built into one end of the house. The books include the Wildlife Encyclopedias, the Man Myth and Magic series, folk and fairy tale collections, kids and cartoons books, Samuel Johnson, Gore Vidal, H. P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. LeGuin, Lafcadio Hearn, John Crowley, T. H. White, and others. Kind of hard to reach, but I manage. 

This is another shelf built into the wall; it is where another door used to be. The first four shelves are mostly kids' and Young Adult books. Here we have J. K. Rowling, Jeff Smith's Bone, Alexander Key, John Bellairs, Kenneth Grahame, and many Scholastic books. The bottom shelf has Peter Ackroyd, A. N. Wilson, books on writing, and the end of the Complete Peanuts series. Unfortunately it also supports one of my essential but messy power bars.

Here are a couple of shelves and a dresser that are (of necessity) behind my couch. On the left is Madeleine L'Engle, Mervyn Peake, Robertson Davies, some Penguin Classics, Peter Kreeft, some biographies, and most of the Complete Peanuts (with an old Avon shampoo bottle in the shape of Charlie Brown). Continuing down behind the couch is a space made when one of the shelves collapsed; there are more Penguin Classics, Patricia K. McKillip, Japanese folklore, and others. On the middle dresser are the Gold Key Comics Digests; in the drawers are some of the fancier action figures. On the right shelf are G. K. Chesterton, Tim Powers, and James P. Blaylock; on the shelves behind the couch is the Storisende edition of James Branch Cabell and my annotated editions of classics.

And these are built-in shelves in the kitchen, probably intended for pantry storage. On the top are more kids books (including Scholastic), then L. Frank Baum, and then the next two shelves more folk- and fairy-tale stuff. Note my Saruman staff and the box on the shelf with the Elder Wand from Harry Potter.

This is what I like to call my "Tolkien Shrine". It is made of a china cabinet 'hutch' that used to belong to Nanny, placed on top of a large set of dresser drawers. Besides the books you can see, the dresser drawers contain (on the left side) all my Tolkien action figures, from Bakshi to "The Hobbit Trilogy". In the drawers on the right are LPs, calendars, games, and one drawer of paperbacks, all Tolkien. Very prominent: my replica of Sting. 

Interesting sidenote: when I was in high school, I drew this picture of my proposed Tolkien Shrine. Books would go in the top cabinet and items in the bottom. And now, though nowhere near as ornate (or small) as this, that's pretty much how it works!

I like to call this shelf the Inklings Annex; it's right next and at an angle to the Tolkien Shrine. Susan and Andy bought me this at an estate sale; while most of my brown library shelves are the particle board stuff you can buy at Wal-Mart, this is made of real solid wood. On top and on the first two shelves are Tolkien DVDs, video games, and biographies. The next has Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and so on. The bottom two shelves are dedicated to a Mr. C. S. Lewis.

And at an angle to the Annex, more particle board; on this one it was the top shelf that collapsed. Here we have Hilaire Belloc, Terry Pratchett, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell (that's that black hole on the shelf: Frank C. Pape editions), Neil Gaiman, and others.

This last unit sits right next to my computer desk. It is a black iron display shelf, another item from Nanny that Mom inherited and that came to me. The books on it are there mainly because of their size. It has the Absolute Sandman volumes as well as other comics collections (including Oz, Man-Thing, and Weirdworld). There are books about fantasy, illustration, and myth, as well as tall children's books like "How the Grinch Stole Christmas". On the bottom are all the Enchanted World books, and those three volumes turned on their side are the first three Pogo collections. 

The picture is a little marred by the wires. They are there because I have the only old boxy TV (a huge antique monster) that still has connections ports for the Wii; Kelsey and Kameron come over to play. The game system is on the top shelf. As I understand it, someday an adapter will arrive for Kameron's own TV, and then things will go back to normal. But I'm not holding my breath.  

So, as you can see, my mutt of a library is kenneled any old how. Chance and necessity has built it over the decades, and now a certain amount of inertia governs its organization. It's not pretty, but I love it, and I know where everything is. Well, mostly. They say dogs look like their owners and owners look like their dogs, and my books are a pretty good portrait of me.