Bookshelf

Thursday, 16th March 2006

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. Next Page

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