A Lovely Bookshelf on the Wall

On building an unconventional home library.

Exploring Life and Literature

Dear friends,

Kristine Neeley

is originally from the Mid-Atlantic, specifically Maryland and Virginia, where she spent her time between parents and oriented her life and dreams to the ocean’s horizon. At 18, she moved to the rolling, green hills of Middle Tennessee to attend college in Nashville and has been there ever since.

She met her husband at a university event during their junior year and has now been married for almost 18 years. They are presently parenting in the wonderful, maddening tween/teen years, where every day is an adventure without a map. Most of her minutes are spent teaching their youngest, folding the day’s laundry, or playing chauffeur to endlessly curious and active children, but she does try to make the most of the margins.

Kristine is an as-yet-unpublished novelist and poet, an avid nature walker, and loves few things as much as spending unfettered time wandering through book or vinyl record shops and going to the movies.

Please enjoy this wonderful guest essay from Kristine.

Oh, books, what books they used to know,

Those children living long ago!

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,

Go throw your TV set away,

And in its place you can install

A lovely bookshelf on the wall.

Then fill the shelves with lots of books…

— Roald Dahl "Television"¹

It was an average Monday at our home; the kind when most of our family unit heads to work or school, while two of us remain to reset. Usually, it’s a quiet day I look forward to, spent teaching my youngest and then sifting through the weekend’s detritus, getting ahead of our busy week.

This particular one, though, was a mess. I was simmering and storming through the first floor of our house with armfuls of items I’d sooner toss in the trash. A proverbial bomb had gone off in our home over the long, rainy weekend, and while everyone had done their best to take care, I’d been left to pick up the pieces. And oh, there were so many that day.

But as I huffed and puffed, stomping and stacking books from all surfaces to be put back on shelves upstairs and downstairs and every space in between, it struck me: in a roundabout way, this is exactly what I wanted.

Van Gogh, Vincent. Still Life - French Novels [Oil on canvas]. 1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

I was seven years-old when I first saw Disney’s animated classic, Beauty & the Beast. Beside my aunt in the aisle seat of the smallest movie theater in town, I was transported to a world where the provincial, misunderstood, brunette bookworm becomes, as much as I could understand at the time, the princess. It was the first time I could recall seeing parts of myself so clearly reflected on-screen, and between handfuls of buttered popcorn, a romantic notion sparked in my soul.

I wanted a library of my own.

This dream didn’t fit in a childhood marked by movement: city to city, street to street, parent to parent. There wasn’t much that was constant except for change, and I felt stuck in an endless loop of a life I didn’t choose. Early on, I learned one way — both out and through — was reading. Like Belle, the world was my oyster with a book in hand, and I lived for trips to the library, which was the one place I could count on finding, no matter where or with whom I lived.

Eventually, my book-loving grandmother began to stock the shelves of my life. Many summers’ starts were celebrated by the appearance of a paper grocery bag she’d filled to the brim with dime-a-piece paperbacks picked up at her local library sale. Once demolished, I’d stuff them into the small, woodgrain paper-lined shelves of the small bookcase in my bedroom at one house — only to smuggle some to the other when it was time to go home before the school year started. As I got older, she’d let me shop the age appropriate classics and favorites of hers which she and my grandpa stored on a wall of bookcases in their finished basement; I only had to promise to return them.

A collection begins however it must, small tokens on loan from the library or loved ones. Little gestures make a big difference, and shelves full of books are meant to benefit more than just the person who owns them.

The first piece of furniture I bought for my first off-campus apartment was a small black bookcase with more than enough space on it’s five, fold-down shelves to fit the few books of my own I’d picked up in college. I purchased it from my then-boyfriend for $20 before he left to work in South Sudan. I was only headed just down the street, but embarking on a new chapter in graduate school. We’d be a world apart, though, and I needed my books.

The stories that on those shelves — and the framed photo of us in cap and gown that sat atop — were the constant in a quiet season I learned to live in a place I had known in a new way. Before my life was resigned to copious amounts of reading for school, I steeped myself in lighthearted stacks from the library I let live with me for a few weeks at a time. Eventually, I took to visiting garage sales and used bookstores with friends still in town. It was about all I could do to keep from missing him too much, and slowly, the shelves filled, along with my days.

The cost was minimal, as I learned to open my shelves and my heart to hunting for well-loved books, many of which I’d never heard of. The more my bookshelf expanded, the more I understood how little I knew. The promise and hope an unread book holds are powerful, and we can always use more of that.

One year later, we’d marry and move that same bookcase into our first apartment on the hottest day of summer. I’d never been happier; we were making a home. Soon his books and mine became ours, and the bookshelf was full: a collection that would continue to grow as our family did, almost exponentially when we welcomed our daughter into the world. Not once but twice, the celebrations for her soon-arrival requested books in lieu of cards, and between our friends and family, the “children’s wing” of our personal library exploded.

I have friends who are masters of minimalism and are able to, with their shrewd and refining eye, eliminate the excess. Entering their homes you sense a calm you can almost breathe, while mine is like visiting the office of that one professor with the slightly harried expression but warm eyes behind stacks of papers on her desk: too much book, not enough shelf. Our life has been an unintended experiment in maximalism, especially where books (and toys and art supplies) are concerned. And while we do our best to pare down and purge, I’m learning to accept the inevitable displacement as evidence of our living and reading.

Recently, I remarked to my husband that there’s only one room in our house without books — bathrooms included. “Which one is that?” he asked. “The laundry room,” I said, and he laughed. “It wouldn’t surprise me if there were some in there, honestly.” Given its recent uses as storm shelter, shadow puppet theater, and play fort, it wouldn’t surprise me either.

The presence of books in a home is one way to raise readers, but it won’t always be tidy. Let it be what serves you and your family best. Create multiple cozy spaces, utilize storage ottomans and book carts, and don’t let anyone tell you a nightstand cannot be a mini library.

I may have dreamed of one grand room with French doors and floor-to-ceiling shelves filled neatly with books. The kind where a ladder or two is required, and where comfy chairs, soft drapery, and lots of natural light come with the territory. Quiet, even, where the sole purpose of a space is just for books to live and breathe in that magical way they do.

And while I did get a few formal pieces: helpful living room built-ins and inexpensive bonus room bookshelves fit with lights and ladder — it is anything but contained or perfectly ordered. I’ve yet to catalogue our collections, though there are plenty of resources available to help one do so, and we’re due for another pass-through to release some books to live in their new homes. Our collections are a constantly a work-in-progress.

It’s not a library fit for a castle. Nor is it as exquisite as J. Pierpont Morgan’s whose masterfully designed and crafted personal space caused a London Times correspondent to exclaim, upon visiting in 1908, “The Bookman’s Paradise exists, and I have seen it. …I have entered the most carefully, jealously guarded treasure-house in the world, and nothing in it has been hidden from me.”²

But it’s our treasure-house all the same, one where in every room “more books [are] waiting to be read!”³

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Until next time,

1. Roald Dahl. "Television." Family Friend Poems, https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/television-by-roald-dahl

2. https://www.themorgan.org/programs/who-built-bookmans-paradise-makers-morgans-library

3. Roald Dahl. "Television." Family Friend Poems, https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/television-by-roald-dahl