Better Bookcases, Please

[kent_allard_jr]

mylescorcoran linked to bookshelf porn on Facebook today, and it's a fine site, but reminded me of a long-term peeve of mine: The inadequacy of the common bookcase, and how much I'd love to see it improved upon.

Years ago I visited womzilla's house in Yonkers, accompanying agrumer, drcpunk and mnemex to playtest Shadowfist I believe. The great thing about womzilla's home is that just about every vertical surface is covered with books. I remember, for example, going to the bathroom late at night (we stayed over) to find a full bookcase in there. I ended up sitting on the can until dawn, reading the history of comics. (I hope no one else had to go...) I resolved to do build a similar space someday, whenever I had the money and real estate to do so.

I've made some progress, but in the process, come to a love-hate relationship with bookshelves. On the left is a photo of my RPG collection. The first two cases are cheap particle board, of which I used to have several. However, I found that most particle board bookcases will collapse if you fill them with ... well, books. They work fine if the shelves are halfway hull, or just have photos of Grandma and plastic whales and shit, but not more than that. I found they can only handle my RPGs, since many of the old boxed sets are partially empty.



Eventually I visited local cabinetmakers and bought high-quality wooden shelving. Much sturdier, but they often added fancy touches that made them harder to use. On the second photo you can see the arch on my TSR/Wotc/White Wolf bookcase. It looks nice, but you can't pull out Marvel Superheroes without removing half of the other games first. I'm glad the cabinetmakers take pride in their work and all, but I wish they'd remember what they're making.



One problem I don't have is a surplus of paperbacks, although many of my friends do. I've never seen a bookshelf that's well-suited to them: Most are too deep, and have too few shelves, to put all books on display at the same time. Most folks I know pile them two layers deep and two layers high per shelf, making them hard to catalog and causing periodic avalanches of books. Myself, I put my paperbacks in a corner unit designed to display knickknacks, as shown on the left. Works well enough if you don't have too many.

I've long been interested in alternatives to the common bookshelf: Units with sliding doors, multiple units, or what have you, and I'd love to hear ideas folks might have to improve things. Of course, I could just stop whining, follow Mom's advice and just throw all my shit out. After my last move it's a tempting alternative...

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

As a collector of both books and gaming materials, I can sympathize with this post, Matt.

The wooden shelf unit you have is, as you say, not idea as a bookshelf because of the curved fretwork of the frame on the top shelf. It may be more suitable, as you say, for gaming knick-nacks (dice, card-games), photos (that signed photo of Gary Gygax...), or other similar smaller items you want to show off (your brown faux-wood boxed set of 1st edition D&D).

I make heavy use of Ikea furniture (both Billy bookcases and Expedit shelving), although they aren't ideal for everything. The Expedit cubes are pretty good for board-games because of their size and depth, but they suck at paper-backs. Both they and Billy are pretty good for boxed RPGs and hard-books; soft-covers I often have to place in magazine files. But Billy isn't that good for paperbacks for the reasons you say.

I've seen used bookstores often resort to custom shelving for the paperbacks, making bookshelves that have 1) shallow shelves &) greater numbers of shelves, for the most efficient use of space. This mostly works, save for oversized trade-paperbacks and the like.

What I would really like to get for my own specialty books and collections would be something called 'barrister's bookcases'. These are specialty modular styled bookcases with a glass door front that slides up and back. They were designed for holding heavy law-books when lawyers were more mobile in their careers, had to move a lot when their practice changed, and were made so that each 'shelf' was also designed to be the 'case' for the book. Both books & their case could be transported en-bloc in a move, with the glass front immediately allowing a person to find out where the books and their case needed to go at their other end. They are stackable (ie. you can have a four-stack or a five-stack, etc), keep the dust off, and are often come in standardized sizes, wood types and finishes. Expensive when purchased new, there are also places that produce replica sets, and handsome vintage sets can sometimes be purchased at auctions at more reasonable prices.

::B::

[wellgull.livejournal.com]

One of my dreams, for that magical day when I have money and real estate, is to set up a woodworking shop in my garage and build my own. Not necessarily out of fine materials, of course, but still. Obviously this isn't happening any time in the next five years. Or likely ten. But still.

Anyway, I think the paperback problem is likely nigh-unsolvable. To display mass-market paperbacks well without double-stacking, you would need a very shallow bookshelf, which is a waste of wall space in other contexts. A few ideas come to mind. First, you might be able to repurpose DVD shelving. Something like this would also count. Second, you could come up with some sort of movable bookshelf concept, like the doors in the link, or bookshelves on rails that slide laterally. Finally, drawers might be a solution -- some kind of furniture with shallow drawers where you could stack the mass markets spine-up, and pull the drawer out to look at any individual shelf. Then the book drawer itself would be the unit of display, of course, and you might not like that, but it'd be the easiest way to store a lot of books without wasting space and keeping each one easily visible if you wanted (though bad for browsing...)

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that when you last visited, we had the custom-made paperback shelves at the top of the upper staircase. But I'm certain we had the commerically manufactured, incredibly cheep [sic] paperback shelves in the basement.

[mooninj4.livejournal.com]

I looooove the Ikea Expedit bookshelves; they're sturdy enough to take a lot of weight, and if you use it as a room divider (rather than against the wall) you can store paperbacks on both sides (which enables easy access to all books while allowing double-deep storage).

Some lovely hacks, courtesy of ikeahacker:

http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com/2009/07/expedit-storage-and-room-divider-from.html

http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com/2007/01/expedit-grande.html

[hslayer.livejournal.com]

I'm far from an expert, but I've been extremely pleased with this one:
http://www.staples.com/Bush-5-Shelf-Bookcase-Vogue-Cherry/product_433646

It's particle board, but more heavy-duty than most: the shelves are a full inch thick, and plenty strong. These are the ones we have in the room upstairs in the new house. I had one in the bedroom at the old place, and liked it enough to get two more to complement it.

They're not fancy but they look nice if you don't miss embellishments.

As inexpensive furniture options go, I'll take this sort of stuff over nearly anything from Ikea any day, but I realize I may be in the minority there...