Follow Friday - Jeanne Calment Was 122 Years Old When She Died

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Primrose Musings and Bookworm Brandee.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: Bookshelf Tour! Take us on a tour of your shelves.

Because I'm living in a space that is just a little too small to hold enough bookshelves to keep all of my books, the majority of my books are stacked in boxes right now. I do still have a fair number of books on shelves though, so I'll show them to you. I didn't have the time (or the technical skills) to make a decent video, so you'll have to make do with still photos. This first picture, to the left, is more or less my primary "active" bookshelf next to the bookshelf on which I keep my unread review copies. As the review copies get read, they get moved over the the white shelf and placed in alphabetical order by author with the rest of the books. Yes, that is a "Don't Panic" towel hanging over the shelf, and yes, those are NASA themed Legos on top of the other one.

These shelves to the right hold most of my professional books - my history books, my law books, my math and science books, and so on. They also hold my various Time-Life collections, a pile of magazines that I've held on to, and, at the bottom of one shelf, some bookcase games. The white binders are filled with notes and material that I've written over the years, mostly for role-playing games. Except for the reference books, like the couple of dictionaries shelved here, I've read all of the books in these pictures, which is the basic requirement for a book to get "shelved" rather than stored. Because I have more stuff than space, the tops of the shelves are where I store things that I want to have handy, or just that look cooler than the stuff I keep in drawers and cupboards.

Starting with the first picture, the things on top of the shelves are a couple of tae kwon do trophies, my atlases and some of Angela's art books that are capped off by my Jack Skellington Christmas hat. Yes, I said Christmas hat. The Nightmare Before Christmas is my favorite Christmas movie. Next to that (straddling the two photos) is a box of miniature figures upon which sit my dinosaurs - if Wash from Firefly can have dinosaurs in his spaceship, I want them on my bookshelves. Next to that are my two unopened commemorative Olympic bottles of Coke, my Cal Ripken, Jr. baseball, a rack of old cassette tapes, my replica Luger, and my Darth Vader gloves. Next to that are card catalogs with statistics for summoned monsters to use in 3^rd edition Dungeons & Dragons, and a box of my Babylon 5 cards, topped off with a Communist era eastern European military hat of undetermined origin. One of these days I should ask my friend Dave where he got it. Yeah, I have a lot of odd stuff. I'm a nerdy guy who writes a science fiction and fantasy oriented blog.

This bookshelf mostly holds my role-playing game books. The entire shelf on the right hand side of the picture is role-playing books. The top three shelves are all for the d20 system, while the bottom shelf is mostly 1^st edition Dungeons & Dragons stuff, with a little bit of 2^nd edition Dungeons & Dragons stuff mixed in. The left hand bookshelf has my GURPS books on the bottom, and then above them are my collection of Dragon magazine issues and my miscellaneous role-playing game books. There are a couple of binders on here, mostly full of law CLE materials, and a couple of video game guides. The top shelf has my favorite collection of books: My complete collection of the Babylon 5 script books and the five volume set of J. Michael Straczynski's Asked and Answered books. Yeah, I love Babylon 5. How did you guess?

In the previous photo you may have noticed a couple of shelves to the left and the right of the role-playing books. Those two shelves hold our DVD collection, and although it is reasonably extensive, I didn't include pictures of those shelves because I decided to focus on books and the shelves that hold them. On top of the shelf I have one of my Ray Harryhausen tribute figures, a couple of dinosaur skeletons, and all of our Skylanders figures. We don't own all of the Skylanders figures, but we're pretty close. In addition to books, I collect science fiction magazines. Because I am somewhat disorganized at the moment, they are all stacked on the shelf pictured to the right. They are organized by publication - Asimov's, Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, If, and so on. This shelf is between the kitchen and the computer table, so the top of it is mostly used to keep random stuff. It is also where we keep the flashlight in case we lose power.

The last shelf in the tour is the one where I keep all of my mass market paperbacks. To avoid wasting space, I double shelve the paperbacks on this shelf using little risers I made out of two by fours and incredibly cheap molding to lift the back row of books up so that they are visible. Like the books on the white shelf, these books are all organized alphabetically by author. I have read all of the books on the actual shelves. The books on the top of this shelf are stacked up in no particular order as they are mostly books that I have recently acquired, usually from a library book sale or via Bookmooch.

That's the tour. I didn't include pictures of the boxed up books, because that would have been fairly boring. I hope that at some point in the future I'll be able to move somewhere where I will be able to have enough book shelves that I can keep all of my books out on shelves, but I'm not there yet. Until then, this arrangement will have to do.

Go to previous Follow Friday: A Chinese Checkers Board Has 121 Holes

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Mitch Kapor Became a Millionaire by Designing Lotus 1-2-3

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