My New Library Tour!

foreigner my name is Greg I'm here with Joel he's actually operating the camera today say hello hello so you probably won't see him today but he can chime in whenever he wants so today we're here for a

tour

of the

library

. I'm going to be the Vanna White of this and show you the changes we've made to the

library

because the library didn't used to have that much space for books and if you've been watching my book reviews you know I've been talking a lot about how last summer In particular I had a really tough space crunch and I had to make a lot of really tough decisions about which books I wanted to throw away and Joel heard that and started coming up with a plan. about making room for more books and honestly making this room a little nicer, not that it was terrible before, but another thing we've done is we've made it a better room to film in, so I'll probably film There's a lot more from here, but we thought it would be fun to take a

tour

because it's so different and I think it's really pretty.

What Joel did before: There were only three shelves here and there was one there, which you'll see later. and those were the only shelves in this room and those shelves had nice molding detail on the top and bottom, but because of that they only had five shelves per unit. Joel was looking at other shelves and found these ones that have six shelves per unit, so even if we had only made four shelves we would still have had an extra shelf per unit, but Joel analyzed the layout of the room in the space and realized that if we got a little closer to the window we could fit in too. on an extra shelf here, so now I have four shelves here alone and then we have another one on the other side that is the same size as these and we have two half shelves here, so I haven't done the math to figure it out.

How many extra shelves do I have? Does that come to mind? No, Joel, at least five or six more shelves, so basically a full shelf and, yes, you're actually right because it would be about two additional shelves because we have that one and the other one. These equal a full unit here so that's two extra shelves but six shelves per unit and Jamie comes to say hi and see what we're doing hi Jamie so that's the difference here's how this changed we also have a new. desk, but we're going to run over there, so let's start the tour and start again here because this is the first thing you see when you walk into these little half rack units and this is what Joel surprised me with. out of the way so you can see it and one of the things that's really fun about this is that you can see this when you walk down the hallway to the library because there's a long hallway here that leads to points in this outside window so you can see this from the living room and every time you walk down the hall and Joel bought it for me for Christmas, thanks you're welcome.

I love it, it turned out very pretty and, in fact, you can. I filmed my Friday readings video here. and I didn't want to point it out, but it was in the window and I love that you can see it when I'm filming here and you can read it a little bit, obviously it's a supposedly fun library and it's really cute, I love it. It was a really nice thing for Joel, thank you especially after you figure out how this all works and you can see there's a bed for Jamie underneath, because there's another one there.

I'm trying to work here a little bit more, but we'll talk more about that when we get to the desk, so hopefully we're trying to make this comfortable for her too, so we had to turn off this light because it's a little off-putting when we're filming something, but we could probably turn it on when I move in the other direction, so the other thing that's really cool is that when we had all this extra space, I always wanted to divide my books into sections and it didn't make sense when there was no room for that, but with all this space I was able to do it so this is actually my nonfiction section and we have a few others um and since there's so much space I was able to tackle some books and what's the hope.

So it's just that we can grow in space, if I start to run out of space I can turn some of them back so the column is on the outside, but it's really nice to have them facing outwards, it makes me happy to be able to see them. the front of the books, so I have the nonfiction section here and it continues here through this obedient boy yellow book um and then the rest of that shelf is kind of a combination of fiction, poetry and drama anthologies, like this which I have some like collections of the best American stories of the year or the century, um, some books of poetry, not many because I don't read much poetry, but I also have angels in America and some plays like that, and then the shelf in the medium is for graphics. novels or graphic memoirs and it's nice to have a space for them, like fiction and nonfiction are grouped together for that, but I think that's fine and then the bottom shelf is for suspense and mystery novels.

I don't have many of them and in fact Sue Grafton is in her own space up here because she would take up too much space with some of the old Guinness toys that Jamie was never interested in so we put them up there too so that's what there are on the shelves and then as for the rest of everything we have the independent bookstores of the United States filling the map which was something they did for independent bookstore day not in 2022 but in 2021. we brought one home and uh I started filling , you can see where We did the independent bookstore tour in September 2021 because we managed to visit a lot of stores in Colorado and Wyoming as well, so we have it framed and as we continue to visit more stores, we will continue to color them.

I have a finger. The painting that my niece made for me when she was only three years old. She didn't have it in a frame before, but she was getting damaged, it was just floating, so I put it in a frame. I have my Charlie Brown things, I love you. sticker this is looking at the word in London and I love that painting and it's a store I really want to visit that's my grandmother we lost her in 2021 I got a quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg this was actually like the Bible for me during a time when I really became obsessed with the Academy Awards, it goes year after year telling you who was nominated and who won, and that really fueled my obsession and these are some of my beloved childhood books, in fact, this is not a book of childhood, I don't know if I can get it out without tearing it all down um and it's not a song I was particularly in love with, but my Aunt Connie gave it to me when I turned 21 and for that reason it will always be among my most treasured books, we lost it no long ago. after turning 21 years old.

These are some of the rarest books I have, like older editions of books, some of these are first editions, but not all first editions by Jonathan Franzen, um, the corrections have a printing error, so I think it's here. This is the first edition of Rosemary's Baby. I'm not going to take her out to check that she's assigned to To Kill a Mockingbird, which is my precious book and I've told Joel if there's ever a fire and you can take out Jamie and something else. important documents safely and come back for something else, this is the thing and then there's my best husband award.

Sorry, that's me, although I'm actually Joel and then just childhood books in there and that's, oh, and then the bookmarks above. Joel got a cork board and I had collected bookmarks from stores over the years and in particular from the independent bookstore tour we did in September 2021, so I put them all together. You can see this one is from Bologna in Italy, but the rest. of them are from the United States, this is Louise Erdrick's bookstore in Minnesota, there are just a lot of fun stores and some of them are aspirational, like I asked gays to speak, but I haven't actually been there, but they included a postcard , so it's there like Well, and of course, Montana Book Company, my favorite is here twice, so it's fun and that brings us to the fiction section, which obviously takes up most of the library because I read mostly fiction , so we decided to try it originally.

I don't want to spoil what's here because it will be a fun surprise, but originally we had the books laid out a little differently and what I decided was that it was fun to have a fiction series on all four shelves and Again, since that's what I read the most, it's what I have the most and we'll probably continue to add more, so I tried to go through again and find books that I like and that are important to me in some cases. I had to face a book that I'm not that passionate about or haven't even read yet, but I tried to really think about what I was faced with and part of that involved finding these positions, they were actually very difficult. and find out that they can be very expensive, sometimes it is very expensive for not many of them.

I finally found three six-packs each, so there are 18 spread throughout the library, and I bought everything that person had left, so I don't even know. if they are gone, but the fiction continues to the end and I am very happy with the way it looks, I love it again when I film on the desk, you can see these books and I like that I have achieved many of the books that are important to me are face up and I would have loved to see them in this case take out the bodies face up, but the way this rack works if I have the spine out of the mirror and the clear, this doesn't really work as face to face as well which is a case where I compromised a little, but that's okay, I'm totally fine with the way everything turned out.

I'm glad we were able to get a place for us. because I love that book, I had to have a Tony Morrison looking out, this is one I haven't read but I hope to this year and my beloved The Secret Life of Church Ladies stares at Jamie while she takes a nap when it does. take a nap in that chair and so on in the corner and this is an old typewriter. We were talking about how we wanted to. We would have loved to leave this somewhere where you can actually open it and see it and the same with this card. catalog that Joel gave me for a birthday a couple of years ago, we'll figure it out, we'll work on it in the past or sometime in the future, but there's some fun stuff on the top too and I had on the top too I have some of my other Oscar books here a pride book uh these actually came from my dad's wedding when he married his husband uh this was a wedding favor from Joel and I uh this is actually a signed Polar Express that my sister gave me for Christmas one year, these are old entertainment weeklies.

I put away all the Oscar numbers and then some children's books and fun stuff and that brings us to the desk next to the fiction section. This blanket is actually a promotional blanket for Banana Yoshimoto's book. It was given to us in Italy by the woman who had that bookstore that you saw the yellow bookmark for library train. I think I don't know how to pronounce it. It's t-r-a-m-e in Bologna. If you're ever in Bologna. See. to that store she was very nice we had a great conversation with her sorry I apologize for Jamie's barking by the way we can't do anything about it.

We will have such a lovely conversation with her and we tell her about Montana Book Company and we decided we would send her a t-shirt and in return she gave us this blanket so actually it's also a souvenir from Italy too and then we replaced the desk that used to be there here. this really complicated standing desk, so we had a little table and then the standing desk on top of it and it was very unwieldy and kind of difficult, it wasn't really attractive. This is actually a standing desk, well it's adjustable so you can lower it like this. or you can raise it so it's at desk height and then I have my monitors for work, a photo of Joel and I, my bookmark selection right there so I can choose all my bookmarks.

I've been taking notes on Pulitzer's books. I could make index cards this year if I want to take notes a variety of pins these are souvenirs from Italy and then of course a lot of this is just practical these were actually two of these were gifts from our adopted son for my birthday one year, the in the middle was Miracle on 34th Street, which was a gift for my birthday many years ago, so this is kind of a new filming setup and part of that is letting me jump so I can see this lamp, not the most attractive thing about The world, however, reflects light and one of the things that was really difficult when filming here before was the angle because that desk was so unwieldy that it was difficult to get a good angle and the other thing was the Because there was a lot of Darkness in this room, it was very difficult to film most of the time.

If I filmed here, it would look grainy, so it reflects light. You also have this accessory that also has a remote control. when I film I can have the ring light finish that and it works because later in the afternoon if I don't get to film early in the day I turned off the wrong light, sorry I can close this curtain becausetimes in the afternoon. the light coming in is very bright and it still has a lot of light and it has a naturally good angle on the bookshelf so I will be filming here a lot more and the goal is also to rework here because when we first set up the original version of this desk which was just before discovering that Guinness was ill again.

By the way, I decided to use this even though I know the holidays are over. It's very cold here today, so it's a day for cozy weather. but when we found out he was sick he always got anxious if you didn't spend a lot of time with him so I went back to the couch and worked from the couch to spend time with him and I thought I would. I would never regret spending that time with him and I didn't, and then after we lost him I tried to come back here, but now Jamie was upset and a little anxious and we were all working on our own grieving process, so that I moved Back to the couch, but I think we're in a good enough place that we can start the transition for me to work here again and hopefully we've made this room comfortable enough for her to be okay.

I've worked here a couple. many times and she seems to be okay with it, so it's going to be a really nice improvement from the way I did this a couple of years ago, it's a mosaic, you can probably see it through the curtain, just a tree. and wind it up, so it's fun to be able to look at that while I work and I can also spy on the neighborhood through the window. Oh, and the calendar was a gift from a friend with pictures of Italy, uh, for Joel and me. That's something fun that I can have there in February too, it's food for those who don't love food and it's something really fun and that brings us to the part of the library where I'm excited about everything. but what I'm most excited about is that it really hits this weird nerd spot that is the Pulitzer Prize shelf, so I always had a shelf here, before there were only three there and then one here and it was just an extension.

There was no section of everything, so it was fiction, non-fiction, all lumped together and it started there and ended here, so one thing I was talking to Joel about before we did this is that if I were doing sections, it would be like this. It's fun to pull out all the Pulitzer Prize books and put them here and put them in chronological order from the year, obviously, the year they were published, but also the year they won, and just have them there and then have a little space in the bottom. uh for the future and one thing we did, you probably noticed that in December I bought a lot of Pulitzer books and there were a lot of them in my book collection and a spoiler for my January book called There Will Be Many Again because I found a seller on eBay who I had a lot of these Franklin Library editions of the Pulitzer books that I'm in love with and we really spent a lot of time finding affordable versions of these books and completing them to make them look really pretty.

At this point I have a copy of every Pulitzer Prize-winning book since 1918, which is the first one up here, with this first one up here, from 1918 to 2006, which is the bottom shelf, uh, sorry, I didn't. I want to speed you up, but I don't have Franklin libraries of all of them. I have like this is the first edition of The Way West. This is a reproduction of the first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird that I bought a pair of. Years ago, um, and then you can see that 1978 is the year Elbow Room won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, that was the year they did all these Franklin Library editions, so the ones they did after were special editions and they can be very expensive, which That's why you see it move away from the Franklin library books from then on and around this time they didn't make them anymore and then we get into the modern era, so right here's the first that I'm missing and then I'm just missing two more uh between uh one the sympathizer here um Night Watchman and I'm blank oh the general story that would go here between the Nick Boys and the new one, which is the Netanyahus, so I think which looks very pretty.

I'm super excited. At the top I have extra copies of these books, so I would obviously prefer not to read the Franklin Library editions whenever possible, so these are additions I already had and then replace them with an affordable Franklin Library copy when I could. find it or like this is my copy of Mockingbird tequila that I have had for over 20 years. This is probably the one I'll read when I get to that part of the project because I don't want to open the reproduction of the first edition um, I got this copy of Andersonville at my local secondhand bookstore and I'll read it instead of the Franklin Library edition, my library recently had a copy of the city for a dollar so I'll read that instead of the Franklin Library Edition and I don't actually know where the city is here but I created a guide for myself here.

I made a list of all the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction and made some kind of key so it's useful to refer to if I need to know where something goes or where to find something without searching and the color code is this if it's highlighted in blue . I read it before I started doing the Pulitzer Prize project and when it comes to recent books. I decided to do the project when the previous story won, so what I'll do next is if I read the book before it wins a Pulitzer Prize, I can still highlight it in blue.

You can see I haven't read Netanyahu's yet. It's waiting and if I read it for the project or re-read it, I'll put an orange here. I reread it for the project, so I gave it an orange line. Green just means I made an in-depth video and you can watch it this year. there was no winner but I made a video about it so there's a deep dive for that one and if I read it for the project it's just Orange and this is actually the one I'm currently working on so it's orange but there's no depth .

Development video yet, so no green line, it's totally nerdy, but it helps me keep this organized and know where things are going and it's also fun to track my own progress, uh, while I'm working on the project and I love it , this is honestly. As much as I love the entire library, this makes me very happy. I really love it, so that's the new library and, um, that's what we've been working on, that's the kind of thing that I wanted to make sure I took the time to give the whole tour because I think there's a lot of fun details here.

It was very thoughtful of Joel to help plan all of this. I told him that his birthday is in February, so we have to do something really nice for him at the same time. level like this because this is a project that we did together, but it's all and Joel will enjoy it, but it's really for me, so we have to pay you back, he's laughing, but I want, I wanted to show it because I'm very happy with the way What it turned out to be, this also makes me very happy, if you follow me, you will know that I really am.

I really love this Pulitzer Prize project where I try to read all the books that won the prize. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and along the way I decided I wanted a copy of all of them too and I'm really happy to have them in one place because it feels like a home for my project, which makes me happy, but that's it. That's the new library. You've already been able to see some previews of that side while filming other videos. And I'm happy that you can see it and get an idea of ​​what it is, what it looks like and everything. of that, so I think that covers it, yeah, so I'm going to take a second to thank you for your time following this video as always.

I really appreciate it and will come back until next time happy reading, thanks foreigner.