Friday Fun: Rearranging Bookshelves

At some point I need to have a big clear out of books, clothes and knick-knacks, but for the time being, let me still dream of endless shelf space! Some of the home libraries below have lots of room to play with, but others are very clever at making the best use of quite narrow spaces.

American painter Winslow Homer seems to have been quite keen on books too, and clever at using this corridor for bookshelves. From TheMaineMag.com

A more spacious corridor than any of us might possess, but still a delightful way to decorate, from zillow.com

If you have a whole outhouse or barn at your disposal to turn into a library, you can even create a book club and workdesk area. From Business Insider.

The classic French chateau look, from photonshouse.com

The English dandy look, complete with record player and chess set, from Awoum.com

Clever or excessive use of lighting in this double-decker library/living room? From Pinterest.

A more discreet use of lighting, from PhantomLighting.com

Friday Fun: Artists’ Studios

As writers, we may be able to write in a bustling café, on a crowded kitchen table, in a cave with poor lighting, even in the shower with the right tools . But if we did have an artists’ studio, with perfect lighting, wouldn’t we be able to write even better?

Simon Starling, from the Independent.

 

Studio for wildlife illustrator, Chander Construction.

Georgie Wolton’s studio, planetpropertyblog.co.uk

Josh Keyes studio, Bookish-ambition.blogspot.com

Bonus point: all those paintings/illustrations/pictures are really inspiring! But perhaps, after a while, you just get so used to them hanging around on your walls that you no longer see them. Over at dVerse Poets, Björn has us re-examining the familiar, disassociating ourselves from it, so that we can see it with fresh eyes once more. I’ve chosen the third of Tolstoy’s techniques  – use of dialect or a foreign language – to create this sense of ‘strangeness’.

Tablouri, desene, întinse pe jos,

pe pereţi, o dezordine în care nu găseşti

şi nu gândeşti

nimic

decit inspiraţie.

Nani? Hontoo?

Bitte schwätz langsamer…

(Just playing around in Romanian, Japanese and Swiss German. Translation is roughly: Paintings, sketches, scattered on floors, on the walls, a mess in which you can find and think nothing but inspiration. What? Really? Please talk more slowly…)