Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘book collections’

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Bookshelf Porn

by Celeste Ng

Can’t get enough of beautiful bookshelves, stunning stacks of stories, juicy journals? Turn to the internet for your fix. Breathing Books posts amazing book-related photos every day, many featuring old leather-bound hardbacks: And the Guardian has recently started a Flickr group for bookshelf photos, asking readers for the stories behind their books and cataloguing systems as well. One commenter, who has a small owl statue peering out from between her books, notes, “Not really a bookend, more an owl sandwich. I’ve got quite a collection of childrens books featuring owls – I think it was the first bird type my […]


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Books We Can't Part With

by Celeste Ng

When I moved from Ann Arbor to Boston, movers came to pack our things. After the thirteenth box of books–literally–Mover #1 actually set down his tape gun and said in complete seriousness, “Do you really need all these books?” Oh yes. I needed them. The New York Times, however, understands that now and then one must actually cull one’s library for reasons of space. The editors asked several authors for their advice on how to do it: Francine Prose: Unless you are an Egyptologist, you only need one, at most two, enormous coffee table books on the Art of the […]


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Furnishings of a literary life

by Celeste Ng

How often do we think about our books as physical objects, part of the essential furniture of our homes? The Elegant Variation has a lovely little post about the joy of setting up one’s library again after a move: So now the arduous task of refilling the books begins. First, we need to douse the whole collection to protect against silverfish (also at Mrs. TEV’s insistence). Then I need to incorporate new additions to my library into the boxes packed more than a year ago, and figure out exactly how to order the whole thing. (The previous arrangement could politely […]



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