But I’ve read a lot of reviews and commentary later that have prompted me to speak up a lil for our beleaguered Dewey Decimal Class.  Things like this comment, posted in the Amazon reviews section for Isabel Gillies’ Happens All The Time, a memoir of the breakdown of her marriage:

“Seems like another rich, privileged ’so called author’ getting a book deal she doesn’t deserve.”

Wow.  Ouch and double ouch.  The rest of the review is pretty scathing, but something about that one sentence makes me thing that the person who wrote it detested the book, the author, and the whole idea of either one of them existing before she even cracked the cover.  I could be wrong, but…”book deal she doesn’t deserve?”  Deserve?    A book deal?

Oh, honey.  I hate to bring the downpour upon any would-be writers out there, but book deals aren’t about talent.  They are about marketability.  There is no ”earn” here, nor is there any “deserve.”  And yes, Isabel probably did get the size of deal she did because she was a tv star before she decided to write. (And no, I don’t know what it was nor do I know her; we were seated at different tables at the last underground Everyone Who’s Ever Written a Book Convention that a few readers seem to think I attend.)  Does this mean her book has less merit on its own?  (Incidentally, I think not, and especially not in this case.  I really liked the book.  Tough read, but I couldn’t put it down.)

And conversely, what about the nobody who writes a memoir that STILL becomes a success, regardless of the writer’s non-Hollywood pedigree?  Must a book like this automatically have more merit than a piece of Glit Lit?  (Yeah, I made that one up too.  Not sure about it, may change it.  If you have a better term, please do comment.) 

Ummm…no.  Random books come out all the time and happen to snag on some lucky corner of the market.  Doesn’t mean they’re “better”, doesn’t even mean they’re good.  And you can’t blame the celebrity machine for their success and seeming heaven-sent fortune.  You can blame Jesus, and this country that keeps allowing any old nobody to read and comment on anything at will.  Unless you’d really like to change that, why all the anger?

Cause there’s a great deal of it out in the memoir aisles, and not all directed at blond, seven-foot-tall actresses.  I read comments and reviews on memoir after memoir, bleeding with the treatment of some reader who clearly picked up the book with claws pre-sharpened, blood boiling with a hefty dose of Who-Does-This-Person-Think-She-IS-Writing-A-Book?  Why is HER story so important?  Why is her LIFE worth pages and money and space on a bookshelf.  WHAT MAKES HER SO G-D SPECIAL?!?!?! 

If I may so kindly answer, on behalf of all memoirists (everyone else, duck):  Because she (or he) has a book out, and you don’t.  Not that you couldn’t.  It’s a free country and the presses are open.  And if a “nobody” with a “boring” or even “idiotic” life was marketable to some publisher, somewhere, then surely you are, too.  But maybe, judging by your comments, you don’t have the patience to work out your story on paper, or the courage to face an audience of people like you. 

Because that’s what it takes to be a memoirist.  You don’t have to have a Hollywood story.  You don’t even have to have a good story, or a well-written story.  You can have one that, like Isabel Gillies’, happens every day.  But you do have to be tolerant, persistent, and (here’s where the anger thing is a bit of a hairlip), kind. 

Yes, you read that correctly.  I don’t mean sweet, sappy, fluffy-reviewer kind.  I mean you have to see that there is a place in the world, and on the shelf, for all kinds of stories.  You have to accept that there’s as much beauty in the ordinary as there’s diamond dust and holographic covers in the Hollywood Hills.  And you have to love life and the relentless retelling of it in every stilted, ordinary detail. 

That’s how you do it.        

But there were the rare exceptions.  For me, the first happened in the second grade — that illustrious bastion of healthy habits known as Pizza Hut launched its Book-It Program. (Remember that?  Turns out they still have it!)  Here’s how it worked (then, anyway): 

1.  You read a book.  Any book.  For each book you finished, you got to fill in a circle on a chart at the front of the classroom.

2.  When you’d filled five circles, you got a gift certificate good for a free personal pan pizza.

Oh, but the glory didn’t end there my friends.  I begged my parents to take me to Pizza Hut the night I earned my first certificate (ahem…first in the class, of course).  And when I arrived, the waitress presented me with the coveted Book-It button.  It had room for five star stickers at the top, one for each Pizza you earned.  And it was a little bit like a medal.  Really, it was.  Anyway…

I planned on wearing my button to school the next day, but I forgot.  No problem.  Everyone else in the class was only on, like, their third book circle on the classroom chart, so I could wear it the next day and still be F-I-R-S-T. 

But then Tonya Reemsma walked into Miss Gallegher’s classroom.  Tonya, who had only one circle filled in on the chart.  And that was for the book Miss Gallegher gave everyone automatic credit for, because she read it to the whole class.  Plus (though no one dared mention it), Tonya was in a special reading group that hadn’t exactly moved on to reading real books yet.  They read these pamphlet-type things, and Miss Gallegher said that was as good as a book to them. 

Of course, I did not point out the distinction.  I did not even think of doing so.  I was very thankful for all the books that I was able to read.  But I was seven.  And my little sister had just gotten a shiny gold trophy for tee-ball and…DAMMIT!  Deep, deep (I mean waaaay deep) down, I wanted to shriek: “It’s not called FLASHCARD-IT!!!!!!!!  And you can’t count a book just because you sat there and an adult read it to you.  In that case, I’ve read the entire Bible, probably about fifty times!” 

But I composed my self.  I steeled my ankles inside my Kangaroo tennis shoes, straightened my jumper, and calmly asked Miss Tonya (picture Gollum in pigtails; I’m sure that’s how I looked when I did this):  “Where did you get that?”

She said that she had gone to Pizza Hut the night before, too (I didn’t see her there…hmmmm).  And when she told the waitress she was participating in Book-It, the woman had just gone ahead and given her the button.  (Yes, thank you Pizza Hut employees for your contribution to the death of literacy.)  It didn’t have any stars marked, though.  It was blank.  But it was still a trophy. 

Over the years, my teachers would throw other quasi-competitive reading “competitions,” but none carried quite the bloodthirsty fury of that first round of Book-It.  And even I lost my drive for that after I figured out you couldn’t get eny higher honor than that button.  That button was it. 

A few years later, when Meg was in the third grade, her class had its own reading competition.  It was a national thing, called “Beyond Books” or something like that.  All you had to do for that one was make a list of all the books you’d read.  But mom and Meg found a loophole, see.  They discovered that the rules didn’t specify the books had to have been read within the contest period.  So they made a list of every book Meg had ever read in her whole entire life (which was a lot by that point, believe it or not, if you counted all the teeny little learning books that kids read in the beginning).  Meg was so proud when, midway into the contest, she shared her list “so far” with her classmates.

That was a mistake.  From then on, everyone was on to the trick.  And a few individuals (including…ahem…the eventual “winner”)  evidently interpreted the lack of a time frame in the rules to include all the books they had read or might read in the future.  At least, I think that’s why a certain little snot named Emily Franklin included A Farewell to Arms in her list.  Surely, she didn’t just copy the titles from her parents’ bookshelf.  She wouldn’t have had time to do all that!  Not with finishing The Owner’s Manual for the Whirpool Electric Washer, and all.       

Meg came home furious the day that Emily was crowned Most Literate of All.  Everyone found the contest outcome a little dubious, but no teacher in America wanted to get into a parental battle over whether a child had actually read a certain book.  You see, that would imply that a teacher didn’t necessarily think the child had the capability to read a certain book.  And if you saw this Emily chick and her formidable mother (lots of sweaters with embroidered apples and chalkboards worn to the parent-teacher conferences, even though she wasn’t a teacher), you’d sooner “imply” that they both had venereal disease.  The outcome was final.  

Meg cried, and when Mom, terribly proud of her and hurt to see her so upset, asked what the prize was, Meg muttered: “Th..the beaver pencil.”

“Um…wha??”

“A pencil that a beaver bit off of.  The wildlife lady brought it and Miss Forest kept it for the prize.”

Mom couldn’t duplicate that one, but I think she sat back and relished the way that her child and others had clawed, fought, lied, and battled their way to being the “most well read” in the class. 

Will it ever be that way again?  I don’t know.  I read somewhere that Pizza Hut is changing its name to The Hut to attract its waning hip, young crowd, and something tells me that means Book-It will also end up a casualty of coolness. 

Oh well.  Hey, at least us nerds still have the St. Jude Math-a-Thon.  Though I was never going to win that one…   

Of course, finding the holy grail of choice reads is a little like trying to stuff a dozen wildcats into a pillowcase.  Book tastes are diverse.  They’re varied, they’re unique, and in this economy, they’re sensitive.  I think it’s part of the whole apocolyptic attitude.  People resent “wasting” time and/or money on a book that didn’t resonate with them.  We’ve become hoarders of the precious and exclusionist toward everything else.   We want a perfect match or we don’t want one at all.

Writers with…ahem…current manuscripts in the works are especially aware of this phenomenon (at least they should be), and I’ll be interested to see if it has an impact on what the market turns out.  Will books become worse or better as they seek the popular middle ground?

I know that common thought would say “worse.”  Diversity in the reading market is good; it challenges us.  And, despite the opinions of fellow authors who freak the heck out every time someone one-stars their book on Amazon, everyone benefits in some way from every book they read.  They come to realize what voices connect with them and which are hit-and-miss, and maybe they start to wonder about how they sound to the world.  They find themselves enthralled with some characters, while others bore them to the point of not finishing the book.  And then, once it’s closed, they may later ponder other aspects of their lives that are little more than unfulfilling time-wasters.

A personal example:  Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.  You’ve porbably at least heard of it; heard it praised, heard it loved, heard it reviled.  I’m on the loving side.  I adored the book as an adventure-driven metaphor for the classic faith journey.  But my family (rather faith-driven themselves, as you know), didn’t feel the same way.  In fact, I got the same criticism from all of them: “Okay, but I couldn’t make it past the first 150 pages.”

All of them (yes, the preacher, the preacher’s wife, and the preacher’s phD-seeking younger daughter)said that. 

And for my part, I huffed and fumed like Yann Martel was my Honor Student godson. 

How *could* they?  Finish the book!  I pleaded.  Just do it!  I begged.  You won’t regret it!  I promise!  I swear!  Oh, for the Love of God FINISH THE BOOK! WAAAAAAAAAAH!

More than a year has passed.  They have not finished the book.  And I have at long-last abandoned my self-imposed Herculean labor of shoving it toward them like a Saturn-sized boulder.  If only, I resigned myself to say, if only it came with an instruction, right on the cover.  Something like:  “You WILL love it, but you have to get past the first half.  The payoff is worth it!  Moneyback guarantee.”

When I got to thinking about it, I realized there are probably many books out there that would benefit from reader instructions/warnings on the covers.  I don’t mean the jacket blurbs; those are useless.  They’re written by publicists who are paid to make everyone buy the book, including people they know will hate it.  No, I mean useful warnings, like these:

Even though it’s a bestseller, this book is full of sentence fragments and creative grammar.  Teachers and vocab snobs beware.

If you don’t want to read about a sudden death, walk past this misleadingly colorful and shiny cover.

Author does significant indulgent proselytizing between pages 30 and 65.  You can skip that part if you want and not miss out on much plot.  The rest of it is pretty much worth what you’re paying.

The word “God” in the title does not necessarily make a book appropriate for your Sunday School class, and by purchasing it, you agree not to hate the book for that fact.  

If you can’t get past a writer’s political leanings, you won’t appreciate this.  Have a nice day.

What do y’all think?  Can you think of a book that would benefit from such a disclaimer? 

I find myself apologizing again for the lack of posts.  The past three weeks have found us on the road, across six states (all via car), with a toddler and a prayer.  Speciifc memories are blurred, but somewhere in the mix are mental snapshots of a birth, a wedding, a funeral, a book fair, a speech, and Christ’s death and resurrection (Wow, was Easter really this month?  I could have sworn it happened five or six months ago). 

And beneath it all looms THE NOVEL.  I’m in the final redraft phase, but with each edit, each subtle turn of phrase seems to morph into a turn of plot, and before you know it you’ve written 20,000 words without stopping or washing your hair and you wish you’d just obeyed the order not to feed the gremlins after midnight in the first place.

Yes loves, I’m going off the beam.  But I can explain.  (Crazy folk never lose their abilty to explain.  Ever notice that?)    

Here’s the explanation (wait for it)…writing a novel is hard.  Really, really hard.  I know that this comment seems self-evident to some, but I think lots of other people still harbor fantasies about the lives of authors.  You know, that we spend our days in oak-lines studies, observing squirrels on the limbs outside the windows, while our ballpoints spin automated brilliance, electrified with the joy of the moment.  There’s also brandy. 

Well, to paraphrase my dear friend and mentor, historical author Charles Bracelen Flood: “Writing a book is hard.  Anyone who thinks sitting down and writing is some really fun exercise probably isn’t a very good writer.” 

But I’ve come to learn that fiction writing is particularly difficult. Not because it involves invention and creation, but because each invention, each creation, has to be sustained over several hundred pages. Ever hear the adage that it’s best to tell the truth, because then you never have to remember anything? Well, writing a novel is like trying to keep two hundred lies in the air at once.

It’s mind-scrambling. The novel will keep you awake at night, trying to unravel who did what when, so that you can then apply it who is going to do what and with whom. Unless of course (woe to you), you go back and change something.

And when all these characters, all these fragments, all these subplots begin to fight for space in your brain with you real-life problems, you know it’s high time to finish the thing.

That’s where I am now. And when my calloused little fingers have spelled T-H-E E-N-D, you’ll hear more from me.

To me, as I moved with my father from chuch to church, the unique gravestones of any destination suggested a sense of permanence — they were there when I arrived; they were there when I left.  They were the closest thing to lasting forever that I could see on earth.  I didn’t think there was anything scary about them.  In fact, they were a great comfort.   

I was particularly touched and comforted to receive a recent email from Mary, a long-time resident of the town called “Damascus” in Trespassers.  She knew my mother’s family, and she had an update to offer on the lore of the cemetery: 

You mentioned the engine on top of the tombstone in [Damascus].  Well, ……it’s gone now.  Stolen.  Nobody seems to know who took it, but it’s been gone several years.  It was a point of interest to everyone who saw it.  I always heard that the man buried there was an Engineer on the railroad, and it was his wish to have it placed there.

Did you ever notice the tree trunk tombstone on the entrance road into the cemetery?  I had  heard that a man had carved it himself for his own burial, but I met an older lady who told me she loved walking in the cemetery (I live on the street that goes into the cemetery), that she always stopped to look at that particular marker, because her grandfather had told her this story:

 

The man who made that stone tree lived in Casey County.  He fashioned it in that way because when his wife died in childbirth, the baby died, as well. He was devastated, so the limbs on the tree are broken off, which symbolizes their cut off lives. I think there was one exception, maybe, which was supposed to be him alone.  The grandfather told the lady that he could remember seeing the old gentlemen bringing the stone down Main Street on a wagon pulled by horses in the snow. 

I’m so thankful that Mary shared that memory; that image in itself could became a whole other book! 

After I received the email, I was motivated to go visit a famous local cemetery here in Richmond, VA.  If you’ve browed my website, you know I’ve been to Hollywood Cemetery before.  It’s an extraordinary old place, smack-dab in the city of Richmond.  (You’d never guess that, at the time of its consruction, it was designed to be a rural cemetery.)  It exemplifies just how well cemeteries function at once as archival libraries and ancestral touchstones, as well as repositories of lore, legend, and even plain old lies.  Hollywood Cemetery contains a mausoleum allegedly inhabited by a vampire, chased by an angry mob from the ruins of the Church Hill tunnel collapse.  (Seriously, that legend has become so popular that the family of the crypt’s original inhabitants had them exhumed and moved to an undisclosed location within the cemetery.) 

There are many, many examples of the exquisite tree-type tombstones Mary mentioned, but none of them are from the past century.  It makes you wonder at what sad point in time we decided that “they don’t make them like they used to” could extend to our eternal monuments.  Did it get too expensive, was it too time-consuming, or have these arts simply been lost?  I don’t know which answer is the best one. 

Reminds me of a particular legend my college professor, Gregory Nagy, shared with us during a lecture on Greek civilization, about how well ancient people were able to grasp and appreciate the concept of eternity.  From behind the elegantly carved rostrum, he gave what some would probably consider an example so pedestrian that it didn’t merit Harvard tuition money–the grave of Marilyn Monroe.  When Marilyn died, her then-ex-husband Joe DiMaggio placed a standing order with a local florist.  A half-dozen roses were to be delivered to her grave, weekly.  When the florist asked how long this arrangement was to last, he replied “Forever.”

Twenty years later, DiMaggio cancelled his order.

And I wonder when they stopped making people like the man who carved the tree Mary remembers in Damascus cemetery.  Something tells me they had a better grasp of what it meant to spend eternity in love. 

“Get me a pen and paper, please,” he said, with some urgency.  My eyes shot to the neighboring car’s tires, which I expected to be over the line into our space.  My husband tolerates rude parking lot offenses about as well as he tolerates poison oak. 

But when I glanced through the window myself, I understood.  Tossed on the front seat was a Jason Becker CD.  Sean quickly scrawled “I’m so glad someone else still remembers him” on a crumbled sheet of day planner paper and left it under the windshield wiper.  Nothing more needed to be said to that kindred fan.  But plenty needs to be said to those who don’t know him.  And if any of them have found their way to this blog, please, keep reading.  This is not another “OMG, this guy TOTALLY ROCKS and you HAAAAVVEE to buy his stuff now and download his ringtones b/c OMG OMG!!!!”  Not that fan posts aren’t boring or redundant, but…they are.  And I’m not just a fan of Becker.  I’m humbled by him, I’m in awe of his talent, and I’m frightened by the circumstances that have overtaken him and could so easily have struck me.  Most of all (right now, especially), I’m hopeful that I can learn something from him.

Obsessed with guitar from birth, Jason Becker began performing publicly in the sixth grade.  As a teenager he made four albums of virtuoso-type guitar playing with Marty Friedman, and by 1990 he’d won the readers’ poll as “Best New Guitarist” in Guitar Magazine.  He joined David Lee Roth’s band when he was only 20, taking the guitar post previously occupied by Eddie Van Halen and Steve Vai.  Becker was poised to become as renowned (at least), but fate had other plans.  Jason went to the doctor to have what he described as a “lazy limp” evaluated.  He was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease).  The disease quickly sapped the strength from his body.  Using special low-density guitar strings, he was able to finish recording Roth’s album, “A Little Ain’t Enough.”  Soon after, he was composing music on a keyboard using his only working hand.  Then his voice left him.  Then the ability to breathe on his own was gone. 

Now for the uplifting part (sorry it was a long time coming).  Jason was diagnosed with the disease in 1989 and given three to five years to live.  Obviously he didn’t listen.  He’s still very much alive, and still composing music with the aid of a special machine that enables him to write with his eyes. 

As an artist, I can’t fathom what it would be like to continue to work in your craft while robbed of every single one of your tools, except your heart.  That is the part that counts, but realistically, I’m not sure I could write a book if I couldn’t read the words back to myself as I composed them; coudn’t try them out and manipulate them until I was satisfied.  To me, what Jason Becker does isn’t like writing, even though you’ve lost your hands.  It’s writing, even though you’ve lost the ability to read.  On top of everything else, he also has to deal with the reality of knowing that he will never play these compositions.  He will never be strong enough, and he must always yield the stage to those who are.  How many of us would continue to ply their arts and trades under those circumstances.

I’ve thought of Jason more and more since our sighting of the CD on the car seat.  I’ve thought of him every time i’ve turned on the news this week and heard the words “loss,” “significant loss,” “life-changing circumstances,” “fear,” “robbed,” “destroyed,” “quality of life obliterated,” and “making do.”

In each and every circumstance, these descriptors referred exclusively to the loss of money.  401ks, hedge funds, stocks.  That’s it.  And while I certainly do not want to make light of the economic hardships all of us are enduring now (and you’re in my prayers every day), I have to just go ahead and say it:

Clipping coupons is not “making do with nothing.”

Moving from a house to a less expensive apartment is not “making do with nothing.”

Shopping at the Wal-Mart instead of Neimann Marcus is not “making do with nothing.” 

Taking the bus is not “making do with nothing.”

And for heaven’s sake, checking a book out of the library instead of forking over $14.95 for it is not “making do with nothing.”  To hear the way the media describes how people are “taking shelter” during these ”horrific times,” I’m surprised my librarian friends haven’t taken to standing next to their checkout counters with a bucket, ringing a bell.                   

I don’t know how in the world a car with a Becker CD managed to get parked next to mine, just at the perfect moment.  But, typical PK, I manage to find sermons in the smallest of coincidences, angels’ wings in the air conditioning.  I needed to be reminded what real loss is.  And most of all, I needed to look at Jason’s website, and be reminded that he doesn’t consider himself to have “lost” at all.  He’s deeply spiritual, and profoundly grateful to be one of the individuals who has lived longest with this ruthless disease.

And I’m still the girl who pats herself on the back for buying the generic brand of paper towels. Talk about sacrifice.  

No, in truth, my restraint was more self-imposed. It was me who harbored the secret fear that I’d spontaneously combust if I so much as put one foot out of line. (And actually, my skirts were quite short. Though, now that I think about it, most of them were actually skorts. Sigh…yes. I chickened out and went to skorts when things reached a certain length. But I tried.)

But I (and my dork-goody-two-shoes buddies, I later learned) did have one wild and crazy outlet. I was a book rebel. By that, I mean that I read things that would have burned the corneas off my mother’s eyes.

The best part was, I was encouraged to do it. My parents revelled in the idea that any reading was good reading. If we all went to the mall together, my sister and I may not have always scored the sweaters or shoes we begged for, but –why, of course! — we were always allowed to get a book. I can still recall the pride in my mother’s eyes in the Florence Mall Waldenbooks, when I’d shuffle nonchalantly through the Teen magazines, then toss them aside with a practiced look of boredom and head for the real books. The Young Adult shelves. Sharon and Greg Hancock beemed at this person they’d raised– not just a common Teen, but their own Young Adult.  She was a woman to bo reckoned with; like a spiral-permed heroine of old, she was far more interested in a complete work of literature than in some cheap rag.

And I’d stifle a devious smile, because I knew a great truth that seemed to escape all parents of my generation:

The YA section of the bookstore was a cesspool of NC-17 debauchery. Maybe it was the fact that the parents of my generation grew up in the 50s and 60s, when real books (as opposed to comics or television) were the white hats that identified good, wholesome kids. Nevermind the content. “At least she’s reading!”

I don’t think a single parent in existence has ever actually read the jacket flap of Flowers in the Attic before handing over payment to the store clerk, patting her daughter proudly on the back, and rushing her off to choir practice. And no police force seems to have detected the locker-to-honor-student-locker pattern across America in which Judy Blume’s Forever is traded with the stealth of an illegal street drug.

My favorite vice was always Christopher Pike. Remember him? He had sex, suspense, gore, revenge, the S word. He was the perfect gateway to Stephen King. Or pregnancy. If our mothers had only known.

But they didn’t. They just shouted toward the kitchen table, as we sat with copies of Chain Letter hidden in our Algebra textbooks, “How’s the book, sweetheart? Looks scary!” And we’d just smile, mumble something about lots of haunted houses and black cats, and dive back in.

They were cheaper and less outlandish than tatoos and piercings, but those books left their marks, just the same. They made me feel dangerous and different.

And that’s why, a few nights ago, as I sat poring over a copy of the Slash autobiography (complete with the tagline It seems excessive…but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen), and my husband smiled and said, “You enjoying your book there, honey? What is it?” I just pulled the cover closer, as if it were a flask inside my pajama top.

“It’s nothing, darling. You go right on back to CNN Online.”

Growing up, Meg and I loved to “play” library.  The day my mother bought us a little date stamp during an Office Depot trip, we were in the big time. 

The urge to create a special home for the books in my house has never left me.  When we got married, Sean and I spent a portion of our wedding money on an elaborate shelving system from now-defunct Storehouse Furniture, complete with a rolling ladder for my vertically challenged self. 

Still, I’ve never quit shopping for cool book nooks, and I thought I’d celebrate this season of getting unpacked and organized by providing a gallery of my favorites.  If you have any, feel free to share!

1.  The Classic Rolling Library Ladder System from Rockler Woodworking.  Now, this looks like a pricey home installation, it’s really just the ladder part.  If you have a wall of bookshelves already, Rockler will put together a ladder and custom rolling track you can install yourself.  (It screws into the walls surrounding your shelves.)  It’s not the cheapest thing out there (the ladder and track system starts at $500), but really, can you put a price on having the real library ladder in your house.  I think this contraption could make a stack of milk crates look positively stately.

2.  The Magical Conceal Shelf.  They’re a bit modern for my decor, but I have to admit, these are really cool.  They give the illusion that your stacks of books are just floating, completely unsupported, on your walls.  Great if you’re into books as art. 

3.  The Cave.  Designed and built to order by Japanese designer Sakurah Adachi, the New York Times noted that “[s]itting in this upholstered niche is supposed to make a reader feel secluded — akin to being lost among a college library’s dusty stacks — but still remain visible to passers-by.” Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a website online that still sells this, but the more industrious among you could probably come up with a way to rig your own similiar chair-and-case-in-one. Pretty nifty idea, especially if you’re short on space.

4. Cat Greene Rolling Shelves. Now this is brilliant. Who doesn’t own those few random, annoying tall books that won’t fit on traditional shelves and wind up collecting dust in Coffee Table Land? These shelves roll back and forth to accomodate tall items. Even with nothing sitting on them, these shelves double as functional art A bonus: Greene is green, and practices sustainable construction.

5. Put your books in an underused space. (Cost = free to $$$$). Kimbooktu.com, a fantastic blog devoted to the worship of fun reading gadgets, called my attention to this home in London where the owners turned their staircase into a library. Somewhere else, a homeowner used the space between ceiling beams to categorize and store volumes.

Just a few ideas for those of us who still harbor fantasies of stowing away among the stacks. Feel free to share yours!