Friday, April 11, 2008

A library

My grandfather, who is in his 90's, sent me his library last year. He sent it to me from his home overseas. And he included all of the shelving. Beautiful dark wood shelving from Denmark. He packed the library in many, many boxes with labels such as "travel", "The Russians", and "poetry."



Once the container arrived in port my mother and I drove down to the storage facility to see exactly what we were dealing with, and whether we could bring some of the shelving home to show the carpenter. Because when you are about to have THAT many boxes of books delivered to your door, you need to prepare.



The men at the storage facility were a motley crew of comedians. They wanted to know if we were really going to read all of those books. One of them took a particular interest in my mother's hair (it is very, very curly and cut short and a salt-and-pepper colour). He wanted to know if it was real ( it is). But I digress.



We managed to bring some of the shelves home and this is what we found between two of them:





My grandpa is a riot.



Anyhow. I really needed that patience because shelving a library is A BIG JOB.



It all worked out, finally, and here is a picture of a part of the library, for your enjoyment:



So? Am I really going to read all of those books? Well, I can't really answer that. But I do know one thing for sure, my library will have rules. Because all good libraries have rules.


Of course, I can always pose in front of the library in my sleepwear.


And Colours can come over and pose with me too, if she's in the mood.


I am thinking about starting a book club. The rules of the library would apply equally to the club. You are all invited to join. The book club will convene as soon as I recover from my blogging addiction and, um, actually READ A BOOK.

3 comments:

Badger said...

Wow! What an incredible gift! I have a well-read, hilarious grandpa too. They are THE BEST.

Thanks for the book club invite! I'll bring the vodka, shall I?

KPB said...

OH.MY.LORD. What a gift. From overseas! In a container! With the shelving!


Breathtaking.

Caset said...

that is a marvelous present!

i spent a few months this past year organizing, cataloguing, and reshelving someone else's library on beautiful wooden shelves like yours, but with one of those fabulous sliding ladders as well. even though i don't know that i'd ever read most of the books, it was still wonderful to pretend it was mine for a bit.