Brief challenge: can anybody make me a better icon out of the book cover? This one doesn’t shrink terribly well, but I lack the skills to do anything fancier with it. (The font used for the title is AquilineTwo, available for free online.)

Anyway, the real point of this post is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. With the revisions done and out the door, I’ve decided it’s time to officially dismantle my research shelf — the bookcase where I’ve been keeping all my MNC-related books since April or so. They’re all dispersed back to their usual sections, now. But I took a photo a month ago, to record for posterity what it looked like:

The notebooks on the bottom are unrelated, but everything else is there for the novel. (Well, not the fountain.) Faerie lore on the left of the middle shelf, assorted library books on the right; on the upper shelf, it’s roughly organized by general Renaissance, London, biographies, espionage, and then a few isolates like a book on the Reformation, and a few pieces of period literature. That giant thing in the stack on top is the dissertation Dr. William Tighe mailed to me, one of the few scholarly works in existence that discusses the Gentlemen Pensioners in any detail.

Not everything I used is there. I think my Agas map book is missing, as are The Book of the Courtier, The Prince, and the complete poetic works of Sir Philip Sidney, which I pillaged in my search for epigraphs. I do not claim to have read everything on that shelf in its entirety. There’s almost nothing there, however, that I didn’t at least try.

It could have been a lot more. That’s the terrifying part.

But it’s dismantled now, and I’m finding out just how massively certain sections of my library (like “London” and “faerie lore”) have grown. Rearranging books is an activity that makes me oddly happy, though, so it was a pleasant task for a sunny Friday afternoon.