Afront wanted Harry Harrison or John Brunner. Here’s the latter to be going on with:

Here’s a random shot of my loft library and you’ve got Cherryh to Gemmel, or rather Graves (there are a few none SFF books scattered through here). Seeing this I’m reminded of past reading joys, like the Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld books, the easy reading of Alan Dean Foster and the sadly missed David Gemmel. In fact every book here has been a reading pleasure. Books don’t get to stay on my shelves if they’re just mediocre. I’m guessing Bob Lock will quite like these shelves, as will Gary Gibson (not sure where I’ve put Stealing Light, Gary, but it will end up there). Nor do the numerous titles missing here that I read from the library.

I haven’t put every picture up because there’s loads of them, and I thought it might be fun to let you suggest a writer, then I’ll find the picture that covers that writer’s portion of the alphabet…

Here then is the collection of Kirby Ubben, who for some time has been threatening to bring his collection of my books over to England for signing, but now cannot afford the excess baggage charge. Interesting to see that he’s managed to obtain some books I thought virtually unobtainable. Nice one Kirby!

Here’s some seriously cool ones that make me very jealous. How lovely it would be to have that kind of space for book cases … well, I do, but have to climb up a ladder into the loft to get to them.

These belong to Petr Kotrle who is the Czech translator of my books. And in that respect he must be doing a good job since The Skinner won the Salamander there (an Academy Award) and Gridlinked was shortlisted.

Here’s a couple more for jealous appraisal. The first belongs to Mark Chitty and the second belongs to packrat54. Oh and, additionally, you can find Bob Lock’s one here.

Now, I’m always interested in other people’s book shelves. If I’m around someone’s house I like to check out what they read and, more importantly, what they keep on their shelves. This interest extends to when I pick up one of the crap lifestyle/celebrity/woman’s magazines (usually in a dentist’s) and flick through it. I’m not looking at the people, or most of their furnishings, I’m looking for books. This is usually a disappointment because, if you pick up one of the celebrity lifestyle magazines like Hello, on the rare occasions you see a room with a book shelf in it, the books arrayed there are usually for appearance sake. Often you’ll see the beautifully-bound collected works of Shakespeare which you know for damned certain have never been opened. Sometimes I wonder if the book spines might be some decorative plastic moulding that came with the set of shelves. A sad reflection on those ‘celebs’ that demonstrates the victory of appearance over substance. Anyway, getting to the point, all this is why I like to see pictures like this one of Pekka Jonsson’s book case in Italy, tagged for me on Facebook. Pay special attention to the bottom righthand corner.