Happiness is a Bookshelf?
30-Aug-2006
There are days I really worry about myself. There are some sort of silly things that make me really happy. Most recently this has been a new (and very simple) bookshelf in my office. But what makes me happiest about it, is that I now have one place for all my mixology and cookbooks! And none of them are stacked on top of each other so that it’s a major construction project to get the one at the bottom out and then stack them all back up again! This was a more involved project than might be apparent from the description. And in some ways I’m not quite done. You can see a bit of a shelf in the photo – well there was another one of those that ran directly behind where this bookshelf now stands. And the most challenging part is that those shelves on the wall hold part of my shot glass collection.
So the beginning of the project required me to find a place to temporarily store the shot glasses; take them down (and dust them!); take the shelf down; spackle and paint to cover the nail holes and then finally get around to removing the smaller bookcase that had been there; assembling the new one; and moving all the books to their new home.
A while ago I whittled down my cookbook collection but then it grew just a bit again. The good news is that it has been holding steady for several months and that everything fits on this shelf with one small exception. So what you see here is 99 cookbooks; 19 mixology books; and assorted pamphlets, holiday magazines and combination user manual/cookbooks from various small appliances. The only thing missing from this shelf are the four Culinaria books that I keep in my living room as they are not so much cookbooks (although they are filled with recipes) as travel guides, history books, cookbooks and coffee table books all rolled into gorgeous volumes divided by country.
And it just works out that the size of the shelves works well for organizing the books, too. On the very top shelf we have the mixology books (being held up by two boxed sets of cookbooks). The next shelf down holds books devoted to appetizers, parties and entertaining. This is followed by cookbooks that focus on a certain ethnic region. The next shelf holds what I’ll call "general purpose" cookbooks – those that pretty much cover all courses from soup to nuts. The bottom shelf holds all the titles related to desserts, baking and gift giving.
It’s just such a pleasure to be able to see everything, have it all organized and be able to pick out any single volume that might catch my attention. (sigh of happiness…)
Culinary Fool 
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