Also, if nothing else, writing this book has really changed the way I experience bookstores. I have a whole different appreciation for the amount of work packed into even the slimmest volume on the shelves.
I never settled because I wasn’t meant to pack toilet rolls or stack shelves.
Many tech company execs who visit to pitch products take time to peruse the shelves and exclaim upon various devices they owned in younger days.
There’s a room in my house where my stereo, records, CDs, and books are housed. I spend a lot of time in that room, sitting in my chair beside the fireplace, reading and listening to music. Sometimes I just stand before the shelves and look at my books, because every single one of them means something to me.
All the books on my shelves, when I would go to them to look for help with my anguish, they all just seemed so crass. They didn’t get it. Those books don’t understand. Nobody understands.
When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.
I think I’m less and less labelled a ‘horror writer’. The books tend not to go on horror shelves any more, and when they do, I tend to take them off.
There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they’re easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves.
I think ever since I started to read, there have been favorite novels for different stages of my life. And one is never bumped out of place to yield to another. Instead, I just add to my favorite shelves.
I remember walking into drugstores when I was younger and seeing all the hair color boxes on the shelves and just being so in awe. Having the control to dye your hair and change your look is such a part of self-expression.
‘Youngblood’ #1 was my first brush with Internet bashing. Message boards were just emerging, but the criticism was drowned out by millions of copies flying off shelves.
The summer of 1976 was so hot that bars of chocolate melted on the shelves before confectioners could sell them.
I’d begun to collect things that were lying in piles on the floor of my studio. I had run out of space, and I started to build shelves. I turned around one day and realized that that was the vehicle for carrying so many of the things that I was looking at and talking about, so they went from the walls to the works.
I got into writing to become a ‘Star Trek’ writer. I was a rabid fan. I had shelves and shelves and shelves of action figures in my bedroom that scared away more dates than I care to admit to.
I bristle at the implication that only with the help of a Big Six editor does a novel lose its self-indulgent aspects. Before the advent of self-publishing, there were plenty of self-indulgent novels on the shelves.
It always ended up that they said, ‘Tony, are Frosted Flakes good?’ And he would laugh and say, ‘Good? Why, they’re great.’ And I said, ‘Well, we’ve gotta do something with the word ‘great’ to make It explode. It has to really knock the packages off the shelves.’
With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I’ve come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.
Growing up, I lived in a house without art: no picture books on the shelves, no visits to museums, no posters on the bedroom wall.
Trump stood up to the failed Biden trade doctrine that filled our shelves with Chinese goods and loaded our ships with American jobs headed overseas.
I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945.
Ice shelves in general have episodic carvings and there can be large icebergs breaking off – I’m talking 100km or 200km long – every 10 or 20 or 50 years.
Each holiday season, as family members arrive and couches are unfolded, my household settles into a palpable nostalgia. Poorly designed photo albums are pulled from the shelves. Home videos of prepubescent siblings in matching pajamas dance across the television screen.
Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.
I have stocked shelves, waited on tables, and bartended. I have been a salesperson at many levels. Each giving me a unique view of what made a company successful and, even more importantly, what made a company fail.
I’ve never seen an ‘English’ books section in, well, an English bookshop, but in Scotland, most bookshops have a set of shelves dedicated to Scottish authors.
The joke may be that no one likes fruitcake, but if that were the case, they wouldn’t appear on store shelves every holiday season!
The optimum amount of sugar in a product became known as the ‘bliss point.’ Food inventors and scientists spend a huge amount of time formulating the perfect amount of sugar that will send us over the moon and send products flying off the shelves.
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