Bookin' It

So, during my unintentional blogging hiatus last week I took on a small project (well, I had planned on it being a small project--it turned out to be a bit more than I had intended).

You see, I have quite a collection of books. It's not, you know, library large, but it's pretty expansive. Many of my books are sitting in boxes in my parents' attack, but some have been traveling from apartment to apartment with me for the past few years. While I had a semi-servicable bookshelf that held, maybe, a third of my books, it obviously was not doing it for me. At our previous apartment, I had stacks of books three feet high surrounding the shelf, sort of defeating the purpose of having the books out, because you could never find what you needed!

Now that we're at the house we've been able to pull some key pieces of furniture out of storage, the big one being the fairly large bookshelf from my grandparents' house. We moved it into our upstairs hallway and I made it my job to take all my books and arrange them on the bookshelf.

However, being the bibliophile that I am, I could hardly just throw the books on the shelves and call it good, especially after going all that time having to search and search for the book I wanted. I decided to sort through the books by genre or subject (the rule being that if four or more books fit a subject area, they got their own section).

What's more, I took it a step further and created labels.

Yep. Labels.

The text is a bit clearer in real life and they are, in my opinion, seriously adorable. And making them was super, duper easy.

1. I went to shabbyblogs.com and checked out their headers. I chose the one above, but there were plenty more.
2. I downloaded the header into my computer and saved the file. I then uploaded the header into a picture editing program (I used Picnik, but any editor that has a text option would work).
3. Then I found the part of the program that allowed me to add text to the picture. I picked a font, centered the text box and added the genre or subject to each picture.
4. Then I resaved the picture with the new text to my laptop, then printed it.
5. After I printed each labe, I mounted them on a stiff paper, leaving just enough paper over the top so I could fold it down and set the labels to rest on the bookshelf.

So, after a few hours for a couple of nights organizing the books (it took me that long because I had to readjust shelf sizes a few time and had to switch up how I was going to organize the books), and then another couple of evenings making the labels, I was able to through everything together.

Okay, so the coolest things on this bookshelf (besides my extensive fantasy collection)? My Havard Classics Collection, which we found here at the new house when we moved in. They were stacked up behind the door of the laundry room.


Here is just a small sampling of what we found. There's everything from Homer to Grimm's fairy tales. I'm pumped.



What's almost as cool as this part of the find are these:

Now, I'm part of the Sparknotes generation--I could hop on my laptop and find endless fodder for analytical essays for books and plays I never got around to reading fully digesting...Not that I ever actually used Sparknotes... However, I remember one of my education professors talking about Masterplots, a series of books she could find at her university library when she was working on her undergrad degree that served a similar purpose to Sparknotes (not that she ever used them, of course...). I thought it was totally hilarious that I, the girl who never, ever would use Sparknotes or anything like it, and a recently graduated Education major, would have a small stack of books choc full of plot giveaways.

Okay, maybe it's only me who thinks this is wicked cool/wicked funny, but I thought I'd share.

So, with all this said and done, and with all the recent book posts I've had up (the top tens, this, a few book reviews in the past), I've sort of decided I might reserect my book blog, So, What Are You Reading? The link is here, but I'm not sure when I'll get anything up there. I've got a few entries on here that I want to do (I'm feeling a little backed up since I didn't write anything for so long!), and then we'll see about the other blog.

Now, if only I could get more readers... :-)