Hall or nothing

[j4]

addedentry and I have a new bookcase in the hall. (Actually, that's not quite true: we have a new bookcase in the dining room and a new bookcase on the landing, which means we've been able to move one of the bookcases on the landing down to the hall.) This brings the total number of bookcases in the house to eighteen or thereabouts, depending on whether you count single shelves or not.

Being Quite Interesting types, or at least quite pretentious types with too much information on our hands (like newsprint), we've decided that the new bookcase needs a theme. And being indecisive types who prefer to outsource our thinking to the collective intelligence of LiveJournal, we're asking you lot to suggest a theme for us. Themes can be as silly or as sensible as you like, as oblique or as overt. The only constraint is that you'd better hurry up because I can hear addedentry shuffling books around and if you don't suggest something soon he might fill it with BOOKS ABOUT CATS. (What does he think this is, the internet?)

[Poll #835350]

Comments

[aldabra]

You need somewhere to put all the books that are so interesting that they don't fit neatly into your other categories. Back when I was organised enough to have sorted shelves, my And Moreover category included things like The Modern Dairy Goat, Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, Ticks of North West Europe, my Hungarian book about chickens, How To Make Your Own Dinosaur Skeleton Out Of Chicken Bones, Proverbs in African Orature, Understanding Your Parrot &c&c.

Hallways are particularly good for this since your guests can idly browse them at parties while waiting for the loo and are likely to find something they hadn't thought of reading about before.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Do not trust wombat. He is attempted to crash your brain and then take it over; "books about books" is the stalking horse for slipping a russel paradox past your mental firewall. Eurylochus.

[vinaigrettegirl.livejournal.com]

Guidebooks, languages, maps, everything you want to refer to or take with you as you go out the door.

Unless it's an upstairs hallway, in which situation, whatever is relevant to the nearest rooms.

A hand in the bush is worth two on the job

[barnacle.livejournal.com]

Could you have books that teach the art of fisting while assembling a bookcase? You could also alternate between memoirs that dealt with being rather rudely surprised during the bookcase-assembling process, and tomes on precisely how to avoid such a scenario.

"I've dropped a nail."

"Well, I'm not picking it up this time."

It might be a niche market.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... The first thing people will see in your house is that bookshelf. And it'd the first target of the kind of prankster who'd plant (say) Brown Girl in the Ring and The Wombles Christmas Gift Box Set in some poseur's achingly-cool and prominently-displayed modern jazz collection.

My advice is: pre-empt all that by stocking the shelf with all the naff, niffy, perverse and peculiar publications that you own. Top it off by propping a 4' purple leather willy with a piercing on the top (or use a smaller one as a bookend), just like they do in Coffee Cake and Kink.

Pramalot

[(Anonymous)]

Since the pram in the hall is supposed to prevent you conceiving beautiful bouncing books, perhaps having books in the hall will prevent you ever owning a pram. Suggest you remedy this by filling the bookcase with DVDs of Kids In the Hall.

...I only joined this discussion because this morning J-P told me (when I had a mouthful of croissant) that your LJ had become a full-time fisting forum. Either you've deleted loads of other people's comments about fisting, or he is the fons et origo of the whole thing.

Kate Griffin