Project Bookshelf

Ah, the bookshelf. A writer’s most prized possession. This week Sundress Publications is showing our bookshelf love by inviting you all to snoop around our bookshelves and learn the back story on all the odds and ends that make our shelves, well, uniquely ours.

Erin Elizabeth Smith’s “presidential” shelf was built by our very own Joe Minarick, Chief of Operations at Firefly Farms! Included: numerous hockey pucks, Goodwill-salvaged pottery (“I’m a sucker for sad and abandoned art!”), childhood stuffed animals, lots of handmade chapbooks, and of course, Jigglypuff!

T.A. Noonan‘s office shelf, which houses: literary criticism, pedagogy, the craft of writing, literary biography, critical editions and classic texts, plus anthologies of all stripes. Fun decorative items include a vintage chemical sample case, a bloody dove (bonus points if you know who he is!), interesting bottles, a Christmas tree made from a remaindered book, a cat-and-birdcage-shaped slide whistle, a salvaged raccoon skull, a fish fossil, and a funky kaleidoscope.

T.A. Noonan‘s poetry shelf includes literary and scholarly journals, single-author poetry collections, the “vanity” shelves (hey, gotta keep it somewhere). Decorative items include a salvaged violin and case, a Windstone dragon figure, a cigar box shrine to my grandmother, a metronome, a miniature artist’s mannequin, my first pair of ballet slippers, a spray of peacock feathers, more interesting bottles, and a bronze medal for my first-ever poetry award (7th grade).

T.A. Noonan‘s fiction shelf is made up primarily of fiction, some nonfiction, many copies of The Butterfly Lady by Danny Hoey, Jr. Also: crafts for the SAFTA Donation Raffle she’s running, a “handmade candleholder that I desperately need to mail,” and her agate bookends. Above: a bronze Shiva, a Korean fan dancer doll, a caparisoned elephant figurine, “Diana, Lovely Maiden of the Bow” by Oberon Zell, a Holy Family statue with a glow-in-the-dark rosary in the base, a Dollar-Store Jesus who looks like he’s taunting a child with Chinese take-out, and a Benihana tiki mug (the straw hole is exactly the size of a standard cigarette –hence its nickname, “Tracheotomy Geisha”)

AND, wait for it . . .

A Bonus Cat! A blurry-but-adorable picture of T.A.‘s cat, Squeaker.

Stay tuned next week, as this is only Part One in our Project Bookshelf series! Who knows there might be more adorable, fuzzy animals in your future.

Sundress Publications would also like to give a special thanks to Luna Luna for the inspiration. Check out their staff bookshelves HERE!