childrens-books thenFollowing on from my post about weeding (see the previous post), I’ve been having a hankering to Do Something about the parlous state of the Children’s Books department. This is pretty well what it looked like up until Monday morning – although after An Incident, the horizontal piles were all moved to the bottom of the bookcase to avoid toppling.

There didn’t seem to be too many of these, so as part of my effort to relieve pressure on both the fiction bookshelves upstairs (just seen in this picture) and the non-fiction bookshelves downstairs, I hatched a plot to take over the little-used “Bookcrossing and hobbies” shelves in what is optimistically called the Spare Bedroom (repository for a futon with no mattress, the clothes airer, my shoes and ‘posh’ clothes and the cat paraphernalia) and move my children’s books AND my three runs of multi-volume encyclopaedias into that room.

Childrens books nowWell, I’m not quite sure how this happened, but this (to the left) turned into this (to the right) when I spread them all out horizontally along the shelves. How? How?

So the encyclopaedias will have to remain downstairs for the time being, while I clear that last Bookcrossing shelf (not seen in the pic) and find somewhere else for my binoculars, camera lenses and cardmaking stuff. Oh, it never ends, does it? But I do feel that anyone perching uncomfortably on the futon base (or the cat, when he makes a break for the food stores) will have a more pleasant time of it for the accompaniment of a collection of children’s classics, from Kipling to Ransome to Streatfeild to Pullein-Thomspons to Ferguson to Willard to Lancelyn Green to Magrs to Eveleigh (note to Kaggsysbookishramblings: there’s a Beverley in there, too!).

persephonesAnd in the meantime, my Persephone collection is looking rather fine in its new home, with plenty of space to breathe (I have a couple on my TBR) and giving the rest of the fiction collection room to breathe, too. All good, I feel. If a bit dusty. Achoo!