Behold the Shelves

So as you may well know, I recently moved.  Not only did I move, but I moved into a smaller living space with my lovely lady. In order to co-exist happily and not have our one bedroom apartment taken over with my stuff, I needed to pare down my book collection considerably.  This resulted in roughly 200 books, graphic novels and comics getting sold to the local used bookstore.  In the words of Lonestar: I kept only what I need to survive.

One of the first things I did upon moving in was set up the shelves.  In the past, I've just had books placed haphazardly on the shelves roughly organized by author and/or series, but after reading a few of Mieneke's Blogger Query posts, I decided I should be a big boy and alphabetize things. Now that everything is organized, I thought I'd share how fly everything is lookin' now.  So, here ya go:

This is my best looking shelf by far, and as is the right of one's best bookshelf,  it has all the best book shelf flair.  The most prominent being the sweet wood-carved duck decoy that my late Grandfather made back in his duck hunting and woodworking days.  There's other sweet flair to be seen, which will show up better when I show you each individual shelf....

The little clay figure was made for me by one of my preschool students.  It's me and him holding hands, and it's a pretty accurate rendition of what we both look like too.  It's been placed next to the Joe Abercrombie books to offset some of the brutalness of those books with it's tenderness and innocence.

This shelf has that sweet little painted-rock car, which another preschool student of mine made for me a few years back.  

This one is pretty much the Stephen King shelf.  My lady gave me that sweet bicycle you see there in the corner.  It was hand crafted in her home country of Zambia.  I like bikes almost as much as books and comics.  

This is sorta the heavy hitter shelf.  It's got Martin, Mieville, and Priest.  That's a whole lot of talent for one shelf.

I like to think of this as my secret shelf.  One of these books is not what it appears to be, and has a secret compartment....

Next up we got my comics shelf.  Uh, it also has the tail end of my book collection, but aside from my Roger Zelazny books, and a few others, this is the comics shelf.  My floppy issues are in drawer boxes in the closet, in case you were wondering.

The stuff between the hippo book-ends is the bloggin' queue.  So I guess you are getting a little sneak peek at the future of the blog here.  On the left is a sketch by Moritat, the artist on All Star Western.  On the right is a bunch of stuff I got from my Comics Club homies.

So, I sorta threw out the whole ABC order thing with the comics shelves.  Instead I just shelved stuff by coolness.  So here you have a bunch of cool mainstream and indie comics.

Here you get the rest of the mainstream and indie comics.  The Africa art piece separates the mainstream and indie comics from my arty stuff.

The final shelf.  More arty stuff, with my Scott Pilgrim books mixed in.  The stuff lying down are the unread floppy issues I haven't gotten around to reading yet.

So there you go, that's what my bookshelves look like...not to mention a sneak peek at how I operate things around here at Battle Hymns.  Pretty modest, but maybe one of these days I'll fully settle down and I'll have more space to really fill a room with books.  Until then, I'll be looking to max out what remaining space I have on these shelves.