Rearranging My Shelves for Summer
Today is going to be a slower, more chat-style post because I wanted to do something less formal than what I’ve been putting out. I’ll be rearranging my bookshelves for the summer season! If you haven’t noticed—and I can’t blame you if you haven’t—I like to rearrange what’s displayed on my bookshelf based on the current season! For a good while now, I’ve had pinks and greens on display for spring. Now, it’s time to get my shelves ready for summer filming.
The first thing to figure out is what sort of color scheme I’m going to go for… my first thought was orange and red, but then someone suggested yellow and blue and I think that’s a much better suggestion—it won’t be as harsh to the camera and it gives me a chance to showcase my favorite book in the red rising series: Dark Age. Yellow and blue it is! Let’s get started.
Oh, you might notice an empty slot on my shelf, right now. Don’t worry, I’m going to address that in a minute.
Choosing the Books
Remaining consistent with my past shelving setups, I want to display at least four books with the covers facing outward, so I need to pick out two blue and two yellow books. To make this easy, I’m going to start off by removing every book from my shelves and then cleaning the shelves up a bit so that I have a nice, clean slate for this venture of mine. Below, you’ll see a photo of all my blue and yellow books. Next, it’s time to pick out the covers I like the most from these: two blue, and two yellow.
I wound up choosing The Fifth Elephant, Dark Age, Snow Crash, and Snuff. These are the books that will be facing outward on my shelves while the others will be spine out… or will they?
Mixing It Up
Since starting my Booktube channel, I have almost always had my books facing spine out, standing upright. This is a perfectly fine look, I think… but I’m trying to mix it up this time around! I’ve seen several different bookshelf aesthetics that I enjoy in the past, so I’m planning to recreate some of those with this new shelving setup. It helps that I’m currently using my storage shelf to display books that don’t fit on these two bookshelves behind me, so I have space to shuffle things around.
I think I’ll display a few of the books on their side and I might play with having some on display with their pages out rather than their spines. I like the look in photos that I’ve seen, but it’s entirely likely that some people are just way more well-equipped to make this look appealing than I am. I’m going to try my best, though! We’ll see how it turns out.
Something’s Missing…
You may have noticed by now that something is missing from the shelf… Hunger of the Gods, by John Gwynne. This is the book I have been looking forward to reading since I finished Shadow a couple of months ago, and yet here we are and I still haven’t read it. It has been a terrible series of unfortunate events. First, I could not find any hardcovers anywhere—in person or online—so I was delayed in getting it ordered, wanting it to match what I already have. Finally, hardcovers were in stock online via Book Depository, so I ordered myself a hardcover… and it arrived in a waterlogged box with the book irreparably damaged.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t drop the book off easily, it needed to be packed and shipped with a label and everything. Not a fun return time for someone like me who has a hard time doing basic tasks without feeling overwhelmed. I did finally get it done. Brought it to UPS and the guy got everything taken care of. In fact, he actually waived the fees because I recommended Shadow of the Gods to him when he asked why I was sending Hunger back. Thanks, UPS guy!
Anyway, that’s just a long way of me saying that I’m going to leave the space blank because my replacement hardcover should be here in a couple of weeks. Fingers crossed, at least. Man, it takes a long freaking time to ship this book. I’m ready enough to read it I might spring the extra cash and get the paperback copy.
Many Discworld Shelves?
In my previous arrangement, I had one entire bookshelf devoted to Discworld. While this sounds great in practice, it doesn’t actually look super excellent in the shot, since everything in the background ends up having a similar appearance. So, this time, I’m going to space the Discworld shelves out across most of the shelves, scattering them about here and there. This should help to stagger the shelf appearances and make it appear more interesting as a backdrop. This may mean having fewer books displayed overall, but those undisplayed books will be going on my storage shelf on the other side of my bedroom.
Wrapping Up
So, there you have it! My new summer background for future videos! I hope that you like it since it’s going to be featured over the next few months. I’m not sure how great this post format will end up being, but I hope that it was fun to read (or watch, if you’re checking out the YouTube video). Next Wednesday I’ll be back with my standard content—I have some ideas for the next post, hopefully, I can pull it off in time!