Shelves

In "A Painful Case", Mr James Duffy had one bookcase, with the books arranged in order of bulk, with a complete Wordsworth at one end of the bottom shelf and a Maynooth Catechism at one end of the top. Arranging by height of books could be a good way to optimize the use of space, assuming that one has some way to adjust and perhaps add shelves, as it seems he did. But Mr Duffy apparently used care in selecting his books, and so may have employed the arrangement more to satisfy his sense of order than to fit in more books.

I removed Dubliners from the shelves Saturday, wiped it down, and stacked with many other books so that we could pull the shelves out to clean behind them. In returning the books on Sunday, I aimed to keep books of the same sort more or less together, but height was a consideration. A Vulgate and a couple of New Testaments are much of a height, and can go on an upper shelf; but a Jerusalem Bible will not. It occurred to me only this afternoon that the height of the shelves is adjustable. With any luck, though, it will be a few years before we undertake this task again.