1980—Shelves
You may have observed in the pictures some evidence of a long-standing vice on our part: book-accumulation. Once we were in Timbaloo, expressing to anybody who’d listen our sincere determination to leave only feet first and in a pine box, I got into the spare-time design and construction of shelves in a pretty big way. These days, the very thought exhausts me, but the energy was there, in the Seventies.

After renovating the basement playroom, I turned to the family room, where two very diverse sets of homemade bookshelves soon appeared. We went to a factory in Lawrence for the wood-turnings (seconds, I think) that supported the shelves on the west wall. You’ve already had glimpses of the product here and here and here.
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These shelves started here, behind the door, in the northwest corner of the family room, and continued the length of the north wall, turning southward a few feet along the east wall, floor to ceiling. The part you can’t see included a broad shelf I intended as a fixed study desk, although I don’t recall that we ever used it as such.1

I must have taken the picture above (with an eye to bragging about my handiwork, just as I’m finally doing here) very soon after building these shelves: the door wasn’t yet installed on the vacuum-cabinet where we kept our (unduly expensive and NOT lifetime-durable) Kirby. But Pappy’s Harvard Classics seem already to fill the top shelf at the corner, and a pair of Radio Shack speakers occupy custom-designed symmetrical positions on either side of the front window.

1Valerie reminds me that Debbie did enjoy extended drawing sessions there. That qualifies.
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Chapter 4
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1979
1980
1981
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