A bookish approach to book space
You can learn a lot about someone from their books, but you can also learn something from their bookshelves.
In contrast to the transience — and inevitable ugliness — of the modern, mass-produced, modular office, wooden bookshelves affirm the continuity of humanistic education. With simple maintenance, well-designed wooden shelves will have a satisfying patina in 50 or 100 years, when nearly all of today’s metal and plastic furniture will have been carted to a landfill, where it will take half-a-million years to decay.
The character of wood shelving communicates something to students, too, particularly when one has built the shelves oneself: They are a symbol of the balanced life of headwork and handwork. The unique qualities of an office containing custom shelving also signify that the professor is a partner in the academic enterprise — here for the long term. One of the great attractions of academic life is the prospect of years surrounded by books and wood.
If you have a small office and a lot of books — for professors, the latter usually outstrip the storage capacity of the former — you don’t want to waste space with ill-fitting bookshelves. Most of the shelves that you buy are not going to fit exactly right, even if they are modular. You will often be left with a foot or so of useless wall space and awkward corner arrangements. Moreover most ready-made shelves are not tall or sturdy enough to reach within a foot of the ceiling, so you are left with a space on top that will soon become an awkward and precarious stacking area for homeless books.
You could hire a carpenter to build your bookshelves. That’s a good option if you are not handy, have no time, and have some income that is not already earmarked for… books. You can usually get exactly what you want, but it can be expensive, and, if your collection is growing, you will need to hire the carpenter again and again.
I find it better to save my money for books. Building your own shelves does take time, but once you know what you are doing, it can become a pleasure, undertaken during mental downtime — usually, in my case, while listening to a recorded book.
Before you buy wood, much less cut it, you’ll want a design for your shelves. That is always a three-way negotiation between utility, cost, and taste.
Lots of graduate students learn to build shelves out of pine boards and cinder blocks in their first apartments. And those modulars work fairly well, assuming you don’t stack them too high. You can also build convenient shelving using standard boards and clip tracks. Such methods have the virtues of being quick, cheap, and easily reconfigured through repeated relocations. But they also scream grad-student poverty and transience, and, no doubt, they cultivate a yearning in the would-be academic for something more substantial and permanent.
If you want to build something nicer — once you’ve arrived at a more stable plane of existence — you’ll need to learn some simple carpentry. I find that best done through experience; the biggest obstacle is the belief that you’re no good with your hands because you’ve never built anything before. You will probably need to buy a basic tool kit — a hammer, pliers, a level, and a variety of screwdrivers. A cordless drill is also indispensable. The cost will be about $300.
With careful plans, you can get wood cut at the building-supply store, but I have never found that satisfactory, except for easy projects with regular measurements. And even simple projects are likely to need unanticipated adjustments that are hard to make unless you have the right tools. How, for example, will you trim three-eighths of an inch off the side of a 48-inch-long board without a table saw? And for shelves, which are, after all, relatively simple, you need only a basic table saw — about $150.
Of course with a table saw, you’ll need a place to work. I now have a workshop in a barn out back, but when I lived in apartments, I used the table saw in the basement of my building or on the sidewalk outside. (It’s hard to remove sawdust from living space.)
I can never have enough space for books. That is particularly true in the offices I have occupied as a professor. They are seldom large enough to hold more than a few hundred books without some ingenuity, which rarely comes with one-size-fits-all installations.
My current office is about 10 feet by 12 feet. One wall is completely filled by windows, another by filing cabinets; another wall is occupied by a roll-top desk, which cannot be placed in the center of the room. That leaves one wall, 10 feet long and eight feet high, which allows for about 80 linear feet of shelving (maybe 800 books grouped by size — unless one creates double rows). With one row of books behind another, you can almost double the amount of storage. Of course the double-row method requires deeper shelves: I recommend sandwiching two 12-inch boards with one-inch strips covering the join on both sides. That’s enough depth for two rows of books, with the exception of a few shelves reserved for oversize volumes.
The back row of books can be made more visible (and it looks nicer) if you put them on a platform about five to six inches wide and one-and-a-half inches high. The platform can also serve as a backstop for the front row of books. If you use the raised platforms for the back rows, you will probably lose one shelf per bookcase, but the appearance and ease of access make the loss acceptable.
As for materials, I recommend hand-selected pine boards because they provide the optimum combination of strength, looks, and cost — though for spans of more than 30 inches or so (depending, too, on the weight of the books), you will have to use at least two boards. Oak is the best material for strength and beauty, but it is much more expensive. You might compromise, as I do, by using pine for the case and the shelf spans, but facing the front of the bookshelves with one-inch oak strips. Plywood can be a good — if unwieldy — substitute for pine boards, but particle board is not strong enough and sometimes has an odor.
It takes some labor to make adjustable shelves, but fixed shelves (attached to uprights) limit flexibility in arranging books, and I find it is impossible to predict how books will need to be arranged in advance — and collections change over the years. For that reason, I prefer using clip tracks set in two grooves that run the length of the uprights (you don’t want to just nail them to the surface). Cutting the grooves with a dado set takes precise adjustment; it is better to practice on scrap wood before cutting the length of a finished board. The clips and tracks usually come in white and brass. Install them after you paint or stain the wood.
The finish of the shelves is a matter of personal taste. Paint is often preferable to stain for the cabinet. Even experienced carpenters will have small gaps in the joins that can be hidden with wood dough covered by two coats of paint. On the other hand, stain can be more aesthetically pleasing than paint, particularly when you are using expensive wood like oak. My usual preference is to paint the case and stain the shelves, and, as I said, face with oak. The stained shelves look particularly nice against a black case; the color scheme matches the look of many university chairs and can make colorful books stand out like gems in a velvet-lined jewel case.
Before you begin building, look into a few books on the subject. Over the years, I have nearly worn out my inexpensive copy of Bookshelves and Cabinets (1987), by the editors of Sunset magazine, but there are many comparable books for sale at your local building-supply center. Be sure to get one that explains the basics of building alongside ideas for projects. There are also many inspirational photo books full of project ideas, such as Marie Proeller Hueston’s Decorating With Books (Hearst, 2006) and Alan Powers’s Living With Books (Octopus Publishing, 1999). Both are designed with the sensibilities of the serious collector in mind.
However, the most inspirational and informative book for professorial bibliophiles is At Home With Books: How Booklovers Live With and Care for Their Libraries (Carol Southern Books, 1995), by Estelle Ellis, Caroline Seebohm, and Christopher Simon Sykes. It depicts some of the world’s great private libraries, but it also includes smaller collections that could be emulated by professors with varying quantities of ability and money. It includes interviews with collectors such as Nicolas Barker, along with literate essays on such topics as the “Art of the Bookshelf,” “The Enemies of Books,” and “Library Ladders.”
Whatever your taste, with patience and practice — and reading — many book lovers will find almost as much enjoyment in building their shelves as they do in filling them. 4
W.A. Pannapacker is an associate professor of English at Hope College.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 21, Page B22
