Tidying your bookshelves

Like a lot of avid readers, I enjoyed Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up but bristled when it came to the section about books. The gist of her now-famous method is this: go through all your possessions by category, touch everything, keep only that which “sparks joy,” and watch as your world is transformed. It seems simple enough, but Kondo gives minimalism the hard sell when it comes to books, urging readers to ditch as many of them as they can. You may think that a book sparks joy, she argues, but you’re probably wrong and should get rid of it, especially if you haven’t read it yet.
Lithub

Literary Trumps needs your help

Another quick mention for one of the Shedworking staff's side projects (which features at least one shedworker in Virginia Woolf). It's a crowdfunded Trumps game focusing on writers, their quotability, their literary prizes, their major works, and, naturally, their speed. You can find out more (and pledge) at the Unbound site which is publishing it.

Arch

En bokhylla bör framför allt annat vara funktionell, men ibland kan funktionen överskugga utseendet. Arch har en avskalad form som tar möbeln tillbaka till dess väsentlighet, ett bärande plan, varpå en enkel estetik applicerats i form av klassiskt böjträ. En hylla som lär följa med från hem till hem.
Fogia

Shakespeare 'digital library' wallpaper

For the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, Vodafone and the British Library have made some of the earliest and rarest editions of Shakespeare's plays available to all, allowing people to download the Bard's most popular works from specially-designed wallpaper featuring virtual library bookshelves.

The pop-up Digital Library is providing new access to free digital copies of the quartos by allowing people to simply scan the QR codes printed on the virtual books as the 'digital library' tours the UK. The wallpaper will also provide digital links through to the British Library's Discovering Literature website (http://www.bl.uk/shakespeare), revealing more about the world of Shakespeare and his plays, from King Lear and madness to the violence of Romeo & Juliet and the life of the Bard himself.

The Digital Library's first official appearance will be as part of the St George's Day celebrations in Trafalgar Square on 23 April, open to the public from midday until 6pm but, in order to share the quartos with a broader audience around the UK, from 25 April the Digital Library will be taken on a tour of cities and rural locations, including Birmingham, Penzance and Silchester.

Fifty Shades of Grey fort

An Oxfam bookshop in Swansea has been inundated with so many copies of the erotic novel that they’ve started begging women to stop bringing them in. The shop now has so many copies of the book, they’ve built a fort out of them.
Metro

Sigurður Guðmundsson's Mountain

The layering of vertical and horizontal lines depicts a certain process from a natural foundation to the man who has created his cultural products: rocks, turf, man, shoes, bread and books.
Culturehouse

Brian Bilston's Bookshelves

 

Brian Bilston

New reading scheme will support young people's mental health

"At a time when 1 in 10 young people have a diagnosable mental health issue, public libraries across England are today launching a scheme to support them with expert endorsed books available to borrow for free. Reading Well for young people is part of the hugely successful Reading Well Books on Prescription scheme and will provide 13-18 year-olds with high-quality information, support and advice on a wide-range of mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders and self-harm, and difficult life pressures, like bullying and exams."

More details at The Reading Agency

CV Shelving

Named after the keyboard shortcut for copy/paste.
Jardine Couture

Seashore Library, Nandaihe, China

Vector Architects

Libraries lose a quarter of staff as hundreds close

Almost 8,000 jobs in UK libraries have disappeared in six years, about a quarter of the overall total, an investigation by the BBC has revealed.
BBC

Funky bookshelf

Designed to go against the wall or in the middle of the room as a divider with peek-through open cutouts. Even more funky, this bookshelf transforms to any space as it is created to stand horizontally or vertically with nine adjustable shelf fitting any which way.
Shiner

The Shelf

Phyllis Rose

Pi Workstation

The Pi Workstation functions as a desk, bookshelf and occasional chair. In addition to these functions, there is the option to remove the bookshelf and transform the desk into a 2 top dining table.
Joe Manus

Library in the shape of a book

A  library in the shape of an open book is expected to open next year in Dubai. The Mohammed bin Rashid Library in Al Jaddaf will hold more than 1.5 million volumes, 1 million audio books and 2 million e-books, making it the world’s largest electronic collection and the biggest library in the Arab world.
The National

JIgsaw: Style and Truth

Jigsaw

Teich Toys and Books

Hunt Architecture

Literary Trumps

As well as running Bookshelf and Shedworking regular readers know that I have also published various books over the last half dozen years, the last two on Bookshelves and Improbable Libraries. This year, instead of a book, it's a game - Literary Trumps. I am hoping to crowdfund this via the excellent book publisher Unbound which crowdfunds all its titles (you may have read the best-selling Letters of Note or the Booker short-listed The Wake).

The game is played along similar lines to other Trump games you will have played in your youth, only instead of classic cars or dragsters, Literary Trumps is all about writers, their quotability, their ouptut and their speed. Please do click on the links above for more information and do consider making a pledge to fund it - the whole thing will only happen if 500 people generously put their hands in their pockets.

What sex is your bookshelf?

What if my bookshelf is female and also male? And what do we mean by male and female books, anyway? Those written by women with female protagonists, or a style and substance beyond this which male writers have access to, or can assume?
Arifa Akbar in The Independent

I Murdered My Library

What happens when you begin to build a library in childhood and then find you have too many books? From a small collection held together by a pair of plaster of Paris horse-head bookends to books piled on stairs, and in front of each other on shelves, books cease to furnish a room and begin to overwhelm it. At the end of 2013, novelist Linda Grant moved from a rambling maisonette over four floors to a two bedroom flat with a tiny corridor-shaped study. The trauma of getting rid of thousands of books raises the question of what purpose personal libraries serve in contemporary life and the seductive lure of the Kindle. Both a memoir of a lifetime of reading and an insight into how interior décor has banished the bookcase, her account of the emotional struggle of her relationship with books asks questions about the way we live today.
Kindle Single