Tag Archives: building bookshelves

Spatial Sarcasm?

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Give us an inch, and we’ll build a bookshelf. Those of you who have read the book or visited our shop can picture the place: is there a space left where we could put up another? (Regular readers may recall, from our November visit to Philly, the outrage Jack expressed at finding Walk a Crooked Mile Bookshop had indeed used their bathtub.)

Yet on Thanksgiving Day, we found three. The bookshop was closed, Jack and I invited to a 4 pm dinner to which we planned to take Cookie Glass’s frozen-in-waiting cookies, so we didn’t have to log kitchen time. With the day clear before us, we swung into frenzied action.

Jack knocked together a standard “sleepbuilt” for under our last untouched window; created a special construction to slip over the counter in the half of our kitchen that is crafts and cookbooks; and built a skinny, tall bookcase—which, due to the influence of my Seattle coffee-fiend friend Cami, I can’t help thinking of as “the latte”—for just outside the bathroom door.

Surveying the latte that is two pocket paperbacks wide and six shelves high, Jack said, “That isn’t a bookshelf. That’s spatial sarcasm.”

But it worked. We now have a “BARGAIN BOOKS” section where paperbacks can go to die. $1 each, or 10 for $5, not returnable. Enjoy, folks.

And perhaps, just perhaps, this time when we stand back-to-back in the center of our store, surveying 360-degrees while saying, “OK, we’ve found the last space where we can put a bookshelf”—well, maybe this time it’s true.

Although I do keep eying the downstairs bathtub….

My Poor Husband

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Those who read this blog regularly know that my husband and I live above the used bookstore we own and operate in Big Stone Gap, VA. This living arrangement leads to some fun handyman projects around the house-cum-bookshop: like painting the titles of novels on our porch steps, so they look like books lying sideways. Or putting up one of those lighted reindeer at Christmas, the one with his head down like he’s grazing, and adding a pair of glasses and a copy of Night Before Christmas.

Jack is a naturally gifted handyman who built all the shelves in our bookstore–including a set of floating shelves upstairs that the customers don’t see. Floating shelves look cool, but they are not space efficient for a shop that is climbing rapidly past 38,000 used books. So we go with the simpler model downstairs.

The project we are most looking forward to currently is the arc de books, copied from a bookshop in Lyon, France. Jack’s been studying on how to build the thing, and I’ve been squirreling away the books we can no longer sell-1990 computer manuals, damaged classics, and those Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. (These are the pigeons of the bookselling world; they leave their crap everywhere.)

Unfortunately for Jack, the interest of friends and fellow bookshop operators in this plan has been piqued. People are sending photos and websites of cool book projects–and I am dreaming big. (Thanks Carolyn Jourdan and Jim Mentink for the photos that appear today.) Jack is keeping his head down and drinking the good whiskey.

Don’t you think these would look nice in our shop, downstairs or up?

I could see myself luxuriating in this tub…

and we could totally use the piano shelf upstairs.

Since Jack is in Scotland right now, leading his annual tour of folkies through Scotland and Ireland, I think I could get a few new projects into his “honey do” jar without too much of a fuss, don’t you? After all, he’s a very handy guy around the house.