Tuesday, April 27, 2010

New bookshelf

When I woke up yesterday morning, it was from a dream in which I was browsing in a huge bookshop.  It was like an old house with many rooms, each of which seemed to be a different size and on a different level than all the others, so that the place was full of stairs and halls and corners.  And, of course, books.  Before I'd fully awakened, I found myself thinking of it as an "archetypal bookshop," almost as if it had an existence independent of my dream.  Shortly afterward, though (i.e., when I was more awake) I decided that in an actual archetype of a bookshop, the shelves would probably reach to the ceiling, rather than being only four feet high.

Curiously, I've dreamed of bookstores a couple of times before (that I remember), and for some reason they usually seem to have lots of rooms and stairs and corners.

Later in the day, at work, my boss was talking about how much he loved shopping at Goodwill (he had found a high-end audio receiver there over the weekend).  Inspired by this, I stopped in on the way home, and found a cheap bookshelf--the first one I've seen there in ages that had all the shelves and wasn't falling apart.  And so yesterday I shuffled furniture around until I found a place to put the shelf, and immediately loaded it up, and now for the first time in a year or more I don't have stacks of books piled up on my floor.  (Oh, all right, there's still a stack or two, but they're books I'm planning to sell.)