For book-lovers, combatting the ever-growing pile of titles is a constant struggle. How quickly that which we love devolves into a haphazard mess of piles. Feeling overwhelmed? Here are 15 shelfies to help you up your book game.
Growing up, I was constantly arranging and re-arranging my shelves by color, by author, by genre, by topic, forever trying to make tangible the emotional connection I felt with my books. They brought so much beauty into my life — why couldn't their display be a manifestation of that?
The real game-changer came around when I moved into my first post-grad apartment and began incorporating additional elements into my set up - family photos, trinkets I'd been collecting over the years, gifts from friends. Suddenly, my books were more than just rows of titles; they were physical embodiments of memories. They began garnering attention from visitors. I woke up each morning facing an illustration of all the places I'd been, regardless of my relatively empty passport.
My appreciation for a Really Good Bookshelf deepened when I began working as a bookseller for an independent bookstore in Chicago. I thought shelving was easy once you, like, knew the alphabet. But there's an art to organizing bookshelves in an aesthetically-pleasing way, one that allows you to drink in all the titles at once but never skip over a single title.
Which brings me to the #bookstagram community on Instagram. With a single hashtag - "shelfie" - you can spend hours pouring over bookshelf set ups from across the world, in essentially every configuration and aesthetic you can think of. Rolling up your sleeves in anticipation? Wait until you see these #shelfies.
Pro tip? Don't forget to stretch first. Books are heavier than you think they are.
