What to do with lots of books in a small space…
We live in a fairly small house, officially it’s something like 1,000 square feet, unofficially it’s a bit bigger because the basement doesn’t seem to be counted as livable space. Throughout the years we’ve lived in apartments of many sizes and finally our small house. Since we love to read, we have lots and lots of books. (I should add that we also use the library a lot too, especially for those books we want to read but don’t intend to keep or those we want to read before deciding to buy as a reference — I do this a lot with craft, science, programming, and cookbooks.)
In one apartment we placed the bookcases back to back to make a wall between the living room and a small sitting area and again between dining room and the entryway. A pizza delivery guy while waiting for us to gather the money commented that he didn’t know the apartment complex had a library and it looked really interesting. So, yeah we’ve got lots of books. Each move seemed to reduce furniture and household items and increase the number of book boxes.
Now we also give them away and tend not to keep the ARC (advanced reader copies) but still the collection grows. So, I’m always on the look out for creative ways to store books so that you can find them when you want to check something out. Right now we’re still in the: science on that shelf, mystery on these other ones, science fiction is on that one, the one over there, and upstairs in the corner and in the bedroom, and so on.
But, I was intrigued with these stair bookcases in the article in Apartment Therapy New York. Books are shelved under the risers of the stairs and along the walls leading to the loft bedroom. There’s also a picture of a stairway that has pull out drawers so you don’t see what is stored there (this one is a keeper idea when we get around to a basement remodel to finish it off). Normally the space under the stairs is unused and this brings up lots of ideas for storage even if you don’t have a lot of books. Hmmm…lots to think about but I’ve got to get back to reading right now.