I discovered this incredible website today, bookshelfporn, and have spent the last twenty minutes poring over all the different ways that you can display books--stacked, shelved, strewn, by color, by title, by author, on racks, on the floor, on ladders, and (my favorite) as a stairway. can you imagine? "to get to the bathroom just walk up the books. careful on the fourth step; that's first-edition flaubert."
Right now we've settled for a lovely (truly) Ikea bookshelf and way too many stacks of seven and eight books in inconvenient locations throughout the house. as gorgeous as the stacks in this photograph are, you can do a lot more with sleek design and fashion coffee table books than with short and chunky philosophy volumes or every copy of pat conroy you've ever seen because you might have one more friend you haven't given his books to. those just aren't the prettiest books out there.
luckily, though, i now have a decorating scheme for my pied-a-tierre on the champs elysees.
