Cornellbooksellers.com

It’s been an eventful and wonderful start to a new year.

On January 1st, 2011 I finally married the lovely and patient Michelle at an intimate & excellent French restaurant in the heart of Ottawa—steps from Parliament Hill in fact—surrounded by loved ones. There was good food, good company and a warm glow:

Photo courtesy of Justin Ferrabee

The next day, we left for a quick honeymoon in Newfoundland—seriously. Check out the view from our hotel room:

…and these mysterious shadows on the rocks of Cape Spear:

And we have returned, rejuvenated and revitalized and ready to take on the challenges of 2011.

One of those challenges includes the addition of new shelving to the Cornellbooksellers.com world headquarters and the subsequent shuffling of stock and personal books. So, a rather timely item appeared this morning in my RSS reader, via Reading Copy, on the amazing Bookshelf Porn blog.

I am particularly drawn to images of walls of books:

As a child, I got to visit and spend time in the bookstore of a family friend—where my father had worked briefly as a youngster—which consisted of rambling, ad-hoc additions on the back of a large Victorian-era house on the St Lawrence river, an hour south of Ottawa. The awkwardly constructed shelves of varying quality were all jammed to overflowing with books, creating an impression of a maze in my young mind. I loved it. I loved the smells, the weird decorations (a huge, stuffed moose head in one room) and the organic nature of the store’s growth over the years. The store was both its own, self-contained little world, and a portal to thousands of other worlds.

As an adult, however, nostalgia gradually intensifies but also gives way to adult sensibilities. I’m now more drawn to modern, light spaces:

…but the walls of books still look good to me.

Unfortunately, neither my budget, nor my living space, really accommodate the construction pictured above. But, to me,  the right mindset for entering into a new year is all about thinking aspiration-ally, right?