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I should become the menswear guy but for bookshelves
A place for peace and thought. 🌻 Brooklyn Heights is for introverts who want a West Village aesthetic. pic.twitter.com/gDFkxP3qYx
— Vinay Hiremath (@vhmth) June 3, 2024
Like, obviously I’m jealous of your beautiful apartment. The mirror replacement was a little confusing. I thought you had a TV in a hallway but we’ll go with it. Why are you keeping your rum in the sun?
Clustering is one of the most important factors of design. The books you group together tell a story. Here you’ve grouped the rock climbing books with the books on intimacy. This implies that sex with you will be puzzling and abrasive.
Oh my God, I actually do have so many opinions about this. First I will say I like the shelf itself. It’s classy and mod. And I like the stacks, I think stacking is underused. The bookends are cute too, though I don’t like how they’re clutching the sex and rock climbing section.
Let’s talk about sun. I’m not sure about your dark liquor, but the sun is definitely going to damage your books. It cooks the glue over time and makes them fall apart faster. But the first thing you’ll notice will be all the red fading off the covers. Check your copy of POWER.
The fore edge and flaps are going to be faded to a pale pink or orange. This will also happen to your sex and relationship books on the top left. I would suggest you switch out to lighter colored books, which will survive longer. Or maybe just have the top be all plants.
There’s plenty of room down beneath. I don’t mind an airy layout like this, the stacks are nice! Looking on, the books are all well trued. Great work, this will protect your books from cocking and leaning over time. But it could be more dense if you need the space up top.
Ignore my typos please, running out the door. I want to touch on one more thing here which is curation. At a guess, these are the books that you have read and have influenced you in life and you’ve kept them around as symbols of knowledge gained?
And that’s fine. I don’t intend to judge you for your taste or for the lessons you have needed to learn but I suspect you don’t actually need to keep all of these books. Like are you getting a lot out of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve currently? Or The Great Reset by Alex Jones?
You could save a lot of space on that middle shelf by donating low value books like these to your local library! (They sell them in bulk and the funds go to homeless services usually.) You only ever get so much shelf space in life. Curate it for things that bring you joy.
And the real secret to curation is not just taste but liveliness. The thing this shelf speaks to is a static and rigid identity. Sturdy! True. But unyielding, inflexible, opaque, intimidating. Like a cliff face. You need to cull the dead wood and let new things spring up.
A good bookshelf is only partly about showing off the knowledge you have collected. It’s also about surplus, the abundance of knowledge yet to enjoy. You have to put some books on there that you’re excited to get to any minute. A good shelf is alive, like a pet. It eats books.
Oh my bad. I thought this made fun of itself. I’ll say this: In the industry when we put a book facing out, we’re telling you not only “buy this book” but also “ask us about this book” and “associate us with the values expressed on the cover of this book.”
not one joke about rich dad poor dad prominently displayed, you need to up your game
— 👾 (@neoncognitron) June 5, 2024
