The extensive use of Zoom meetings during pandemic lockdowns made several people scramble to find good backgrounds for their video calls. One of the go-to setups was in front of bookshelves, so naturally advice began to be dispensed about how one's bookshelf should be arranged. "Non-professional" titles were banished to off-camera shelving. Some folks may even have ordered a few titles from Amazon that they didn't actually read but they figured would create a better impression if the cover caught someone's eye.
Writing at something called Lifehacker, Aisha Jordan offers what the headline calls "How to Display Your Books Like a More Sophisticated Adult." But the only advice she really offers is remove the dust jackets and sort them by color -- and as the comment section shows, that's not the way that people who actually read books put them on a shelf. A couple of other ideas, such as wall-box shelves or a suspension shelf, just seem weird or at best a little impractical.
I think I'll just leave mine where they are the way they are; if someone is nonplussed by my having all of the volumes of the Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson "Wheel of Time" series and a bunch of David Weber's Honor Harrington series, so be it. I can't believe anyone who's known me longer than 15 minutes doesn't know I'm a sci-fi nerdy type anyway.
2 comments:
The disarray of books behind me is better than the various bladed weapons on the wall above them.
I work very diligently to frame those out of the picture.
Besides, my camera is not good enough to pick up actual titles.
I have a couple of shelves designed for high-falutin' display; the ones where I have some Easton Book titles and some older, ornately-covered poetry collections, and the ones where I have my Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin series. Neither of them are my camera background, of course. Close inspection of that area reveals my penchant for P.J. O'Rourke, the aforementioned Jordan and Weber, and Harry Turtledove's alternative history series that posits a Confederate win and then degeneracy into the equivalent of Nazi Germany.
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