My Library is Dukedom Enough

California residents might want to take heed Frau Bibliophagist's warning:

Public Service Announcement: Catholic Bibliophagist urges her readers to hoard books responsibly! Get those bookcases properly bolted to the walls. She lived in a neighboring community during the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, so she knows what she is talking about!... Never put tall bookcases where they could fall on you while you sleep!

She also points us to helpful book-hoarding tips:

How to set up your library so that your reading flourishes

They are some of the ideas that Steve describes in his book The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, and that he uses in his personal library.

1. Create a two-part library. Devote one portion to books you plan to read—what Steve calls your Library of Candidates. Reserve the other for the books you have read—your Living Library.

In Steve's home library, Candidates are on shelves that line one wall of his study. The books in his Living Library are on the facing wall and elsewhere in his home.

2. Cluster titles of comparable interest. Keep all candidate books on bird-watching together, for example. Even here, though, listen to your inner reading voice, with all its quirks. Do you keep all your novels on Venice in a fiction section, or should they live in a travel section? Perhaps you have enough books on Venice to claim their own section. Each method works.

3. Label your shelves. This time-honored tradition works as well in a home library as it does in public libraries. The label holders that we re-created from a 19th-century library catalog are easily adaptable for any library because they're so simple to customize and easy to move.

4. Keep empty space on your bookshelves so that your library can continue to grow as your interests do. Empty shelves are like a beckoning road ahead.

5. Optional: add a large floor pillow...for your dog. Makes a great footrest for when you choose a book from your (labeled) shelf, sit down in your favored chair, and read. Ahhhh. To quote Shakespeare (shelved under Classics): "My library was dukedom enough."