Today's Bookcase Showcase Post is by Christopher Edge, author of The Dead Ways and the forthcoming Twelve Minutes to Midnight.
First, an apology – when I heard you were coming, I had to start tidying my shelves. There’s an imminent house move on the cards here and, for some reason, this has resulted in chaos blooming amidst the bookshelves. So, to protect you from the full horror of my book collection in its current state of disorder, here is an abbreviated and sanitised tour of my shelves.
The first picture shows the bookshelf next to my desk in the study. This is where I keep the books I need for research depending on the books I’m currently writing. As I write fiction, non-fiction and have even recently turned my hand to gift and novelty books, these shelves can end up being a strange mix of bedfellows. Currently there are lots of reference books here about the strange and supernatural, as well as books covering topics such as stone circles, silent cinema, Victorian fiction and the English motorway system! I also keep a dictionary and thesaurus here, conveniently close to hand.
The next picture shows one of the three bookshelves that stand in the dining room, and the only one that is tidy enough to show you in full. Here, you’ll see some of the authors and books that have inspired me: the collected stories of Sherlock Holmes, His Dark Materials, Roald Dahl, Frank Cottrell Boyce and J.R.R. Tolkien. There are author biographies and books about writing, music biogs, screenplays, graphic novels and lots of books about comics. If you squint, you might also see a signed copy of Black Orchid #1 which I bunked off school over 20 years ago to get Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean to sign. Queued for hours and got into a heap of trouble when I got home, but it was worth it!
The last picture is a cropped shot of one of the other bookshelves where chaos still reigns, but I’ve managed to tidy just the one shelf to show you some of my favourite authors, as well as one of the finest children’s books ever written: The Princess Bride.
Apologies for not sharing with you the rest of the literary Ragnarök currently raging across the shelves: the travel guides tussling with cookbooks, reference books fighting a desperate rear-guard action against children’s fiction, but I thought it was probably for the best. The shelves would die of shame if anyone saw them in their current state!
http://twitter.com/#!/edgechristopher (@edgechristopher)
Comments
Some great books in there. Love all the reference books of Motorways, fantasy and the like. Makes me want some of my own.