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If you were to look through the 45 volumes of his drawing journal, you'd
find that this is a subject that Danny Gregory has tackled:
he drew our bookshelf when he stayed with us for the weekend in the summer
of 2004. You can see the drawing in his latest book, Creative License.
In Danny's version you can read every title - it's an interesting record
of what we had, and in the main still have, on the shelves at the time.
But from here I can't read most of the titles so I just draw the structure,
as if this were the facade of a building. It takes the most of two Shostakovich
string quartets and a Mozart piano sonata to finish the drawing (I like
Radio 3 for this kind of drawing).
I can picture the content of each book as I draw the cover. There are
some books that I've revisited several times and will probably visit again,
such as Gerald Durrell's The Amateur Naturalist,
others that get dipped in for reference several times every year, like
Marjorie Blamey/Christopher Grey-Wilson's Illustrated
Flora of Northern Europe and others that I would like to get into
when I get the time to settle down with a good book - such as The
Topography and Natural History of Lofthouse (a local village) by
George Roberts, published in two volumes in 1882 and
1885. 
Link
Danny Gregory
Radio 3:
at the time of writing you can listen to those Shostakovich quartets,
played by the Jerusalem and Aviv Quartets, online.
Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk
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