illustration of the a strutless dyadic partitioning of the unit
squareGreg Maxwell / Bookshelves


Three walls of our library.
Fiction on the left and center bottom in alphabetical by author. Non-fiction is grouped by subject in a way that, uh, makes sense to us.

The shelves the are white oak and all about 11.25" deep and 1.75" thick, planed down from 2" mostly. The shelves of the center wall are longest, about 113". Copper straps at the end of each shelf plus a little bit of cantilever help keep the long unsupported spans from bowing.

The stands have 12"x12" openings and were made out of 1" steel tube stock. They're about 110" tall. There are cross supports in the back and at the top for stability that you can't really see in the pictures. We welded the first one ourselves but it took us forever, so we handed the materials over to someone more skilled at welding and they cranked out the other 5. Then we had them powder coated.


The feet, cork bottomed to avoid scratching the floor, are on bolts with nuts welded into the bottom for leveling adjustment. The shelves lock together with the stands, so even unloaded and unstrapped from the walls they stay put with an adult climbing on them.

There is normally a large quasi-chaise in the center of the room (where the camera is located in this picture), as you can see in the non-panoramic image.
Here is a flatter projection from the same images. It has some dumb stitching errors as my patience fussing with my custom image processing software ran out. I was a little too ambitious with the image capture and then struggled juggling 21 gigabytes of image data.

We have a second bookcase, not shown, that has music and cooking books, and separate small library that we mostly use for lending which contains entirely books where we managed to obtain multiple copies (usually either cases where my partner and I had the same books when we moved in together in 2005, or cases where we both managed to grab copies of the same thing at book sales).
Found a picture when we were first filling it: