Wold Book Day: Shelfies

It’s World Book Day! Many people are no doubt finding intelligent things to say about that, but, alas, I don’t have the time.

However! Some people are taking SHELFIES for World Book Day, and that is a thing I can completely get behind.

I love my books. I love my pretty books. I love their pretty covers. I love my first editions and my well-loved paperbacks, and one of the first things I did when I moved in was to get out my books and put them in a suitably pleasing arrangement. Whenever someone comes to my house, I secretly hope they will notice my books and be charmed by how good they look on my shelves.

Behold! My shelfies!

These are my First Editions and Other Shiny Books. See if you can deduce my favourite authors and serieses. Yes, I have both the black-on-white and the white-on-black editions of Black House. Shut up. I found the black-on-white one in a charity shop, OK? THEY LOOK COOL.

The gun is from my Apocalypse themed birthday party a few years back. It’s there because reasons.

OK, so, the next shelf down is currently suffering from ‘FUCK, I BOUGHT MORE BOOKS, WHERE DO THEY GO???’. To the right, you can see my pretty paperback books, which have been arranged to highlight both my favourite authors and to highlight kickass female authors. Let’s look closer.

That small box thing, by the way, is the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series, which I bought as a 14 year old member of ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, the official Hitch-Hiker’s fan club. Note how my books are arranged not only by author and prettiness, but by height and colour. (Ignore the bright green Allotment book, I’m not quite sure what that’s doing there.) The eagle-eyed might notice that I have several editions of just about all the Dark Tower books. Behind H2G2 sit the first three books, which enchanted me with their (sadly not visible, here) haunting and stirring covers. Below is a four-book box set of the books after Stephen rewrote parts of some of them to make them fit the later books better. I haven’t actually ever read those, but I felt like I should own them. I also have several first editions (some in both US and UK versions) and a number of ‘lending out’ copies. I am THAT sad for these books. In addition to these are my dad’s awesome boxset of The Lord of the Rings.

Apart from those, the focus of these shelves is on (some of) my favourite lady authors: Anne McCaffrey, Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm, Diana Wynne-Jones, Tamoira Pierce, Ursula Le Guin, Jung Chang, and the Duchess of Newcastle herself: Margaret Cavendish.

And, just because I wanna show you those quasi-revered Dark Tower covers:

Sorry about the light reflection, it’s not really the right time of day to take pictures of shiny surfaces.