To us, a bookshelf represents a liminal space of possibility. It can be an organizational tool - displaying books based on color or genre - or it can be a happy collection of chaos. Bookshelves can be minimalist or overcrowded. They can be an actual piece of furniture or a book basket in the car. A bookshelf can also be a towering stack of books that you constantly bump into in the middle of the night (just me?). A bookshelf is what you make of it.
The liminality of a bookshelf reminds us that it’s also ever-changing. Our bookshelves change throughout the years - sometimes becoming functional and other times serving as a form of nostalgia. Bookshelves are literal displays of our personalities, our aspirations, and our journeys.
Today’s Library Shelfie Day, a tradition started by the New York Public Library in 2014, so we wanted to share our favorite shelf in the Read Furiously office.
It’s the complete collection of Read Furiously titles: forty-one books in ten years. To us, our shelf represents the physical work of our day-to-day responsibilities and systems that take our authors’ words and put them on other people’s shelves. However, it also represents a timeline of our journey as a publisher. This is a shelf holding ten years of publishing fantastic books, ten years of being around creative, passionate people who love books, and ten years of a mission statement where we help our Furious Readers to read often and read well. It’s ten years of supporting independent authors and bookstores. It’s ten years of doing what we can in our community. A shelf full of ten years of hard work, joy, challenges, and accomplishment.
If bookshelves represent aspiration and inspiration, then our Read Furiously bookshelf is the perfect example of how a single idea became something bigger than ourselves. This bookshelf illustrates the important work of our authors, the dedication of our team, and our goal to lift up narratives often overlooked by the big publishers.
It’s a bookshelf that started with one single book and an idea. That single story has become 41 different titles all representing different experiences and voices. Now it’s a bookshelf with a past, present, and future. Not bad for a single bookshelf in a New Jersey office.
Today, I hope you look at your bookshelf and see a world of possibilities, reading goals, and innovation. As for us, we cannot wait to add more extraordinary stories to your reading list.