Shelf Portrait No. 9

Completing my survey of the downstairs bookcase, here’s the second shelf from the bottom. It’s a work-in-progress with only eight volumes currently on display. I was aiming for a shelf of decorative un-jacketed reference-books, and this is how it’s worked out so far. All but one of these are relatively recent acquisitions, though I’ve owned other copies of The Art Book and The Oxford Companion to English Literature in the past. My prior copy of the former got left behind in a house-move; whereas I’d previously had a fourth edition volume of the latter, now replaced by one from the fifth edition in a garish red fake-leather binding.

To join the The Oxford Companion to English Literature I bought the Companions for Wine and for Cheese. thereby covering three major sources of nourishment. To go with the Phaidon Art Book (a cheap charity-shop find), I ordered a matching copy of The Photography Book via ebay. The other three volumes are Leonard Feather’s & Ira Gitler’s The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, The Grammar of Spice by Caz Hildebrand, and The Encyclopaedia of Type Faces by W. Pincus Jaspert et al. in a late ’50s edition.