in the company of books you are never alone myron nebozuk
collections shelving legacies escape our own histories
Ten years ago, while helping the town of Beaverlodge, Alberta reimagine their library, we estimated the number of books to be 9000. The same estimation method for my family’s books also arrived at 9000. As my house is a third the size of Beaverlodge Library, book storage, retrieval and presentation is an ongoing challenge.
bookshelves: We began with commonly available 6’ tall teak veneer bookshelves. I chose teak because William Burroughs believed that Dutch Schultz, the gangster, had a fetish for teak. As our collection grew, we simply bought more bookshelves. Books here are grouped by category and arranged (more or less) alphabetically. These shelves line one wall in our finished basement, a large and open space interrupted with only two steel columns. Our ability to add to another long line of bookcases came to a sudden halt when the shelving factory was destroyed on December 26, 2004 – the Indian Ocean tsunami. IKEA to the rescue: We then decided on contrasting bookshelves to complement the teak ones, and ones better suited to freestanding horizontal groupings. These bookshelves were also better for oversized book categories like architecture and cooking. Given their lower height we used the tops to display particularly unusual or beautiful books. Islands were
arranged in smaller spatial groupings — the space resembles a contemporary library with comfortable nooks to explore and read. To this mix we added musical instruments, inspired by Jaron Lanier who has five thousand musical instruments, most of which can be picked up and played immediately. our pride of place display: The living room on the main floor has a contemporary re- interpretation of the gravity-defying bookcases designed by Herman Miller and his modernist contemporaries. An aluminum, glass and rosewood bookcase holds some of my architectural books (history, theory, urban design and architect’s monographs). This array is also a tribute to my parents whose financial discipline enabled me to start and grow an architectural library when I was a student in Ottawa in the mid 1980s. Particularly heartening were Sunday afternoons when my father, who had wanted to be an architect, would choose a monograph or three, settle into a good chair and read until dinner.
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on site review 40 : the architect’s library :: books, shelves, collections
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