Ex libris redcap

Things have become a little dire chez Hack and Bloke. We have well and truly run out of bookshelf space. Look!

That's the least of it - that's just the little bookcase in my study. It gets worse. This is the largest bookcase in the house, and it's stacked two deep:

But it gets worse still. The dining room mantelpiece has been swamped, too:

Soon we won't even be able to see the cheap-arse Monet print over the fireplace. If there's a mild earth tremor, or possibly even a thunder storm with a bit of feeling behind it, it's all going to turn to pudding.

Random piles of books are developing in odd places. The bedside tables are a given, but when they start forming on the dining room table as well, Houston, we have a problem. Yes, the pile on the dining table is "for review", but that doesn't really make much difference, does it?

I love books. They are my very favourite thing in the world. I love good fiction and history and biography and things that make me think and even the odd bit of enjoyable fluff. Oh, F Scott Fitzgerald, Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain, Charles Frazier, Christopher Koch, Louis de Bernieres, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Augusten Burrows, Margaret Atwood, Janette Turner Hospital, Christina Stead, Robert Drewe, Peter Carey, David Malouf, Emily Dickonson, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Joseph Conrad, JK Rowling and Garth Nix, how I love you all!

I have to admit that I haven't read all of the books on those shelves. I keep buying them and filing them away for future reference and I'm buying at a greater rate than I can read. After all, if you don't buy a book when you see it, it's just as likely that the fickle world of publishing will let it lapse from print and you'll never see it again. And of course, some of them belong to Bloke. I don't mind admitting it now: I'm never going to pick up that thing on optics or any of the electromagneticky stuff. C'mon, I'm an Arts graduate, after all.

And this isn't all of it, either. There are boxes of books still around at mum's: childhood volumes that I can't bear to give up, like Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, The Magic Pudding and The Ghost of Thomas Kemp. Those boxes hold Horton Hatches the Egg, Algernon the Ant, Milly Molly Mandy, the entire Trixie Belden series and The Naughtiest Girl at School. What can I do? Happily, mum has some extra cupboard space. (Thanks mum!)

But I'm afraid the time has come (to paraphrase the walrus very roughly) to speak to carpenters.

I have a lovely vision of an entire wall of bookshelves in my study (which is also the spare room/pissed crash pad - no-one wants anything to do with Bloke's study. He's Not Tidy. Plus, mine has a nicer window.) I'm dreaming of floor-to-ceiling shelves, with a little rail and a sliding ladder so I can get to the top shelf. You know, something that I stand in front of for photographs when I'm A Real And Proper Published Author instead of just a half-hearted hack.

Sigh...