Bookshelfie: Fancy Hardbacks…

Happy weekend everyone! Here for a weekend treat is a nice picture of some of my prettiest books. The angle is a bit weird because they live on the top shelf of the fancy cabinet with the glass doors and I was having to work around the doors and a post in the middle. I probably should have looked for a step stool as well. But hey, perfectly imperfect, that’s me! I love the Virago Modern Classic hardbacks, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I bought some of them just because they looked pretty and I wanted them on my shelf and then read them later! My rule is that a book can’t go on any shelf except the to-read bookshelf until I’ve read it, and I stick with that. I do have to admit that these ones are much less likely to be the victims of a book cull than some of the others on the shelves might be though! Here you can also see a war at play in how I shelve them. This is a compromise arrangement between putting books by the same author together and arranging books by colour. It is deeply tempting to put them into rainbow order (so to speak) but that would mean the Du Mauriers being split up and my brain sort of revolts at that as well! It’s so much easier with matching sets and series by the same author.

Anyway, on these shelves you’ll see Excellent Women, as mentioned in my post about The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym, which was actually the first of these that I bought, but most of these were acquired in the pre-blog era, so I haven’t really written about them. Pretty much the only exception is The Birds, although as I’ve gone back through the blog to check on that, I’ve seen VMC collection in various forms across the last five plus years increasing in size. So far I’ve managed to resist buying the VMC edition of Diary of a Provincial Housewife – but only because I have the omnibus edition on another shelf. I’ve got a Patricia Highsmith from the collection waiting to be read – although I’m worried it’s going to be too scary for me, which is probably why it’s still waiting. Although of course the risk is that it’s not, and then I end up going and buying more of her books…