Shakespeare Shelf
I moved into my 1920s shingled house in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 2013. Since then, the house (which I call "Maud") has become a home for my collections, including paper weights, fridge magnets, skulls (not real ones), souvenirs, dishes, and - of course - books. I’ve been acquiring books for 20 years and can’t imagine my house without them. This is one of my favorite bookshelves. It’s an old shelf I found at an antiques store, and it’s very shallow, which is nice. I thought it would be perfect for my old editions of Shakespeare. I put these books in my guest room, in case a visitor is seized with an uncontrollable desire to read King Lear. I teach Shakespeare, but I don’t teach with these editions; I just think they’re pretty. A lot of them were gifts, but I bought the little blue set when I lived in New York City a decade ago, from a bookseller on Broadway in Morningside Heights, near Columbia. Those booksellers always had good things.
