4/28/2024 0 Comments Book shelf black and white clipartThey’re diligently shelving the ‘future classics’: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Aminatta Forna, and so on. They have the classics covered: Achebe, Morrison, Walker, Thiong’o, Tutuola, Ellison, etc. I can’t lie, they’re doing a great job curating the section already. In fact – confession time – one of my secret fantasies is that one day Waterstones Piccadilly will call me (on my special hotline phone) and request plead that I curate their Black Writing section. I enjoy being able to scan one set of shelves to get a snapshot of new black books and new black authors. And I can understand that perspective.īut, personally, I see no conflict between stacking minority writers in both general areas and a specialised section. I know that when they were common, some black authors disliked and rejected them, protesting that they siloed minority writers. Racially defined areas in book shops are so rare these days. I love the branch not only for the eight floors of awesomeness, but also for its Black Writing section. It’s housed in a stunning art deco building in Central London and contains eight floors filled with miles of beautiful books. (However, the top shelf has no top, so you can fit taller books up there if you dare.Waterstones Piccadilly is ever and always my favourite book shop. So this bookshelf has shelf openings of three sizes: 18″ high for big books, 12″ for the medium books and 9-3/8″ for the small ones. It might be wishful thinking, but so what? So I think it’s worth making a place for them in a bookshelf. Many excellent old books on woodworking, including the 18th-century pattern books, were oversized folios. But when I find them they are worth the extra expense. These books are uncommon in the modern age, unless you are into art books or old books. The large size of book is 11″ x 17″ or some close variant. Yet when I am reading them at home I always wish they were bigger. So you will encounter a lot of these books as you build your library. This became a fairly standard size for how-to books in the latter 20th century and is economical to print. The medium size is about 8-1/2″ x 11″ (slightly more if it’s a hardback). And they fit easily into a knapsack or shoulder bag. It’s a convenient size for reading in the subway or the park. Small books are 6″ x 9″ or smaller – these are the novels and standard woodworking books of the 19th and 20th centuries. Go to any bookstore and you’ll find that most books come in roughly three sizes: small, medium and large. Do we need to adjust every shelf in a carcase 1″ up or down? I don’t. So I’ve always viewed adjustable shelving with great suspicion. But if you are someone who reads woodworking books, novels and non-fiction (and not art books on Estonian midget nudist wrestlers), then trying to accommodate whack-doodle form factors isn’t necessary. You can find books out there that are 18″ wide and 10″ high (yup, a book on billboards). These odd books are at the extreme ends of a bell curve of book shapes (called “form factors” or “formats” in the design world). But thanks to the miracle and wastefulness of modern book manufacturing, we now have some bizarre sizes to deal with. Heck, they once came in sizes that were based simply on how many times you folded a large sheet of paper. Adjustable shelving is, in my opinion, mostly a cop-out.īooks come in fairly standard sizes. I think that if you gave enough monkeys enough mescaline, you might be able to come up with a plastic jig to drill the right number of holes for adjustable shelf pins that weren’t a waste of time or space. What could be wrong about horizontal surfaces fastened to vertical ones? Plenty.įor starters, I’m not a fan of adjustable shelving. But I think there are significant things to say about the warped state of bookshelf construction in the modern age. Trying to improve a simple set of bookshelves might seem ridiculous. This is an excerpt from “ The Anarchist’s Design Book” by Christopher Schwarz.
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