A "Gnedby" is what Ikea has renamed the narrow CD towers once known as "Benno." I bought two of them about a month ago for use down in the library. Yes, they are very narrow, but I thought they would be perfect for use with regular paperbacks, small trade paperbacks, and even small hardbacks like Whitman books. I'd planned to put them together the last Friday I was off, but I had a stinking headcold and a low-grade fever instead. I'd worked through most of both and was damned if I was going to assemble shelving while blowing my nose every five minutes.

Ikea stuff is simple to assemble, especially if there aren't drawers or doors, so these went together easily. Annoyed to find out, though, that the "lock screws" they're now using are plastic. How cheap. Bad enough they quit making all the nice Leksvik stuff—glad we got our china cabinet and bed and the side table and James' night table when we did!—and stopped making the CD dividers for the Billy shelving.

While the shelving didn't take me long, the book shifting did. I love my books, but not having to shift them around in large quantities. The first Gnedby went into the narrow space between a Billy bookcase holding biographies at the top and travel books at the bottom. and the door to the library, and I moved any paperback biographies and small-sized biographies, like the Dell Yearling book of Jean Fritz's biography and the two of Beverly Cleary, into it. A few health books went on the bottom and now there is biographical room again—well, until I finish all the books I have about Theodore Roosevelt, etc. at least! To top it, a foam pumpkin hollowed to hold fall flowers.

The second Gnedby went into the bay between the children's books on the right and my Christmas books and bound volumes of "St. Nicholas" on the left. Again, I picked paperbacks, small hardbacks like children's books, small trade paperbacks, to go on these shelves. I could then rearrange the bookcase so that the World Book Encyclopedia Christmas books and my big Augsberg Christmas annuals, which had been on the floor between two bookends, were shelved.

I tried to arrange the little shelves with some kind of a theme. The topmost shelf is fiction. The second shelf is all my favorite Christmas fiction, the stuff I read every year, from The Cottage Holiday to Christine Kringle. The third shelf is some other fiction and the next is some books about Santa Claus, from the Jeff Guinn trilogy to When Santa Was a Shaman, and the rest are nonfiction books about Christmas history, origins, and customs. You can spy the "St. Nicholas" statue that my cousin Deanna made for my mom on the bookcase to the far left—what better place for it than with "St. Nicholas" magazines?

The library's still pretty crowded; at some point I'm going to buy six of the 15-inch wide Billy shelves and put them up at the end caps of the stacks to add more space. My history books runneth over!

Labels: books, bookshelves, decorating, organizing

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. . . . . Linda at 5:39:00 PM

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