winged

neil-gaiman:

Ah, the first Google result was a tumblr…

youcouldbethatclever:

Beautiful Libraries → Neil Gaiman’s Personal Library (The Basement, Neil Gaiman’s Home)

Take the 3D tour here.

This is beautiful and yet also makes me really sad. My old basement, the last home I properly lived in before my parents moved, was at least half this size (at least, in appearance - we’re probably losing a great deal of size in Neil’s home because of angle), set up very very like this, and every other floor was exactly like this too. When we moved in we had a hundred boxes of books. We actually commissioned bookshelves to look like they were cut into the walls of the family room. From the top floor down, we had comics and my mostly YA stuff in my bedroom; the middle floor all sorted by subject; the bottom floor (sci fi and fantasy and mystery) sorted by author and then title alphabetically except in the case of series. We could have given out lending cards.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of books. Some were sold. Most were given away and finally thrown out when we had to move, people literally wouldn’t even take them for free. My parents have now moved again since then - the new job didn’t last - to increasingly smaller and smaller places -  now they’re renting a place with barely any room for them, much less books. Their collection is a tiny fraction of what it was, I mean, it just makes me want to CRY.

[edit: yes, I realize I sound enormously privileged. That’s because I was. Also, my parents losing all their books is not the only thing that makes me want to cry about that situation. But for someone like my mom it is one of the subtle things that matters a lot.]

(via decidedlydapper)