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Even more than “an idea for a monster,” this is a type of post I wouldn’t even consider making today. Perhaps it made more sense when Blogger was tightly integrated with G+?

Recovered: My Bookshelf

Mostly I’ve been too busy for gaming, but I thought surely I could get in on something so simple as the bookshelf meme.1 So I took the picture, but I haven’t actually got around to it until now. And you may notice that it’s rather sparse in terms of actual gaming-related material …

Two sparse shelves from a college dorm with a handful of books in each corner and some knick-knacks in the middle of each shelf.Shelves, Lowell MA, 2012

The bottom shelf is more interesting than the top. On the left:

  • Carcosa by Geoffrey McKinney
  • Vornheim by Zak S.2
  • The God That Crawls by James Raggi
  • The Decision Book by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäppeler
  • John Hodgman’s Encyclopædia of COMPLETE WORLD KNOWLEDGE:
    • The Areas of My Expertise
    • More Information than you Require
    • That is All

And on the right, starting after the CD binder:

  • Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (I do not read Spanish yet, but someday I will learn3)
  • The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922-1986 by Jorge Luis Borges
  • Don Juan in Hell by George Bernard Shaw
  • Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges
  • Wonder Tales by Lord Dunsany
  • Welsh Place-Names and Their Meanings by Dewi Davies
  • Historic Newfoundland by the Newfoundland and Labrador Tourist Development Office
  • Some pamphlets
  • Railsea by China Miéville
  • The Ship of Ishtar by A. Merritt

Let’s hope I can get more gaming books on there next semester.

Update

Ten years, two moves, and a marriage later, my shelves look somewhat different:

Three and a half full-height bookshelves are anchored against a wall, practically filling it. There are too many books on them and on top of them, stacked in no reasonable way, complete with more tchotchkies.Shelves, Washington DC, 2023

I could spend hours cheerfully excavating all the strata of my shelves. See how the One Piece volumes on the upper right are stacked two deep! Notice the way two oversized volumes of Little Nemo can slip into the fault between the wall and the shelves! Why are there two copies of Dune? Look how efficiently the little boxes hold zines! (I actually would like new boxes that could fit two astride in one of the half-shelves … ) But for our purposes it’s probably easier to zoom in a little:

A close-up of the bottom four shelves of the third-from-the-right case in the earlier photograph. The top shelf is miscellaneous, the shelf below it is graphic novels, and the two bottom shelves are mostly RPG books, with the taller books on the bottom shelf.Shelves, Washington DC, 2023 (detail)

While the zines are hard to photograph, I think it’s safe to say that most of my games are digital these days.

The post was first shared on December 27, 2012. Except, of course, the 2023 update section.

  1. This was once a Google Plus link, but the format should still be self-explanatory.↩︎

  2. I no longer wish to support Zak or his work, and I encourage others not to either.↩︎

  3. In college, everything seemed possible.↩︎

Tags
Essays Recovered
Date
May 5, 2023
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