TechnoPrimitive

Figured out what I would need to do the 28 feet of shelves. Found the bits and cut the long pieces in half. Cleaned (kinda, sorta) and dried the steel and started the installation. After a couple of tries decided on 6 shelves and a 12 inch high area at floor level for large and reference books. There is also a shelf a foot from the ceiling so we will figure on 8 shelves per section. As of a few minutes ago I now have all but one shelf in place and that one needs a blue cross piece that is over at the other trailer and I don’t feel like braving the elements (dark) tonight.

Anyway that figures up to 224 feet of liner shelf space. I counted the books in 4 feet earlier tonight and it came out to 54. Didn’t take an average. But that figures to 13.5 books per foot. So the shelves we have on that wall will hold about 3024 books. Guess that would round off to 3000 or so.

Have decided to move the 10 x 55 trailer with the tin roof up here and butt the back end up to the east most door of the trailer here now. That should give us enough sq footage to house all the books that are in the q-hut now. That way I can move the machine tools into the q-hut and have a real work area with cement floor, instead of fighting the dirt in the barn. Much work remains but it seems to make more sense than any other idea I have had so far.

Doing some rough figuring it seems that using the cross walls and all the long walls we should be able to house 16000+ books in the 10 x 55 trailer. Should be enough for now.

About had enough for the day so am gonna call it a night. Till I type again…

Or something.

For those (most of you reading this) that haven’t been in the compound here that we call home, the bit I wrote yesterday about shelving and nicknack’s most likely didn’t make a lot of sense. For those that have been here, no further explanation is necessary.

Starting at the beginning, the reason I call it a compound is that it’s not just one dwelling even though there are only the two of us living here. There is the original building which I put up 20+ years ago that is the quonset hut. I then built a greenhouse onto the back of it of which half is still here (though not for long) and houses the bathroom and laundry facilities. The next addition was a 12 by 60 mobile home/office building that I moved in at a right angle to the back of the q-hut and is offset to the east by about 4 feet. We then removed half the greenhouse and built a 2 story room that joined the greenhouse half that was left, the q-hut and the mobile home. An additional room 12 x 16 was added to the back of the 2 story part to house the plants, heater, and firewood storage.

The mobile home part is used mainly for storage. The main room is about 24 by 11 and has floor to ceiling shelves around most of it. The bit we moved yesterday was a 12 by 3 foot wooden shelf from a school building that we had on the floor along the south wall under the windows. This was filled with assorted glassware and stuff that we both collect, rocks, old turtle shells, feathers, and ceramic pieces to name a few of the many items. Hundreds of pieces. All of which had to be moved off the shelves, and put elsewhere so we could move the shelf across the room and screw it to the opposite wall above the couch and chair on that wall. Which we did. I went looking for a support for one corner and found a beaver stick that was just right, trimmed to fit and screwed into place. That’s one that they won’t use in their damn dams again! Then every piece had to be dusted, cleaned if necessary and put back on the shelves. After I made a few more shelves that is. Still got to cut two more, and am procrastinating by typing this out. But we are much closer than we were.

After getting the last of the stuff back on the relocated shelves will start on an additional 16 feet of floor to ceiling shelves for more of our books. Then we can move the books off the 12 feet of shelves now on that wall (which have to be moved 7 inches to allow for the full 16 feet of new shelves). So much moving and rearranging fun, so little energy.

And that’s what yesterday was all about. Other than splitting half a truckload of wild cherry to keep the home fire burning. And loading it, then unloading it. And cooking the 12 inch dutch oven full of chicken and veggies. I am quite tired today for some reason, but would like to get at least 3 sections of the new shelves up so we can start moving the books off the existing units so we can dismantle and move them. Multiple sequential vortices anyone?

And I am off to find shelving steel and cut the same. Stuff I have is 12 feet tall so am cutting it in half and making 6 foot shelving units. Then adding another shelf attached to the wall about a foot under the ceiling. Doesn’t look the best but works and has the least waste of anything I could come up with.

The previous 4 posts are direct copies from our Too Many Books site. I am taking it down and rebuilding it from the ground up using something other than Wordpress. Wordpress is good for many things but for e-commerce it ain’t there just yet, and I need something now. So am going with Drupal and Ubercart using their website installer. Hope to have the site back up and actually use it for something soon.

The official Agatha Christie website - www.agathachristie.com

THE site for Christie fans! Nuff said…

www.johncreasey.co.uk

Just what it says. Unfortunately some of the buttons don’t work in either Firefox or Safari on my mac. Haven’t tried Firefox or Opera on the linux machine but they do work on Internet Exploder 5.x for the mac which would seem to mean that the site is Microsloth centric. Lotta good info on Creasey and his writings if you can get to it.

Published by Doubleday and Co. Copyright date is 1960.

Several men sat around a table in The Hague. Hand-picked and carefully screened by their respective governments, they were about to embark on war against international crime. These men were The Crime-Haters.

Patrick Dawlish, England’s representative, brought the Crime-Haters their first dangerous assignment: to find who had planted the bomb which exploded seconds before his plane left London. There were several questions to be answered — had Dawlish been the object of the attack? This was to be the first battle in their new war.

The opening move was clear — locate the woman whose tip-off phone call had saved so many lives but might have endangered her own.

Scene: London and Amsterdam

—

Not a bad read though slow and somewhat stilted at times. Creasey seems to take on a totally different writing personality when writing as Gordon Ashe or any of his other aliases.

Just went to Google.com and looked up John Creasey. Discovered that he wrote under
27 different names and wrote over 600 books. The following list of names he wrote under is taken from http://www.johncreasey.co.uk/ and is as complete a listing as I have seen anywhere.

Author # of Titles
Anthony Morton 64
Brian Hope 1
Chars Hogarth 1
Colin Hughes 1
Credo 1
Elise Fecamps 3
Gordon Ashe 59
Henry St John Cooper 6
James Marsden 1
Jeremy York 22
Jimmy Wilde 1
JJ Marric 23
John Creasey 276
Ken Ranger 2
Kyle Hunt 4
Margaret Cooke 14
ME Cooke 20
Michael Halliday 59
Norman Deane 23
Patrick Gill 7
Peter Manton 13
Richard Martin 3
Robert Caine Frazer 10
Rodney Mattheson 2
Tex Riley 15
William K Reilly 13
William Vivian Butler 5

Now to dig through our collection and see how many of his books we actually have. I know that I have several of the JJ Marric Gideon books that will have to be refiled. Will be interesting to see just how many of the others we have…

Below the fold is a list, in chronological order, of the 66 mystery novels written by Agatha Christie. American titles are in parentheses. Titles of reprinted versions or titles with only small changes (such as changes in spelling) are not noted.

She also wrote approximately 150 short stories and 16 plays, a series of romantic novels under the pen name Mary Westmacott and five books of autobiography and poetry, none of which are listed here.

This information is from the BBC page at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A593723

(more…)

Whole lot of nothing going on today.

Up, fix coffee, check email and daily comics, cook breakfast, shower, sit and read, cook lunch, sit and read, take Cat to the dentist, sit in van and read till she gets out, come home after a quick stop at the store for her to get some sodas (yes, right after the trip to the dentist ), load in some wood for the nights heat, sit and read and finish book, fix supper, sit down and check feeds and write this daily summery or whatever ya wanna call this, and thats pretty much the day.

Todays book was “In Spite of Thunder” by John Dickson Carr. Published in 1960, the copy I have is a first edition but sadly tis a library copy. Over all in good condition but with the usual stampings and torn out library card pockets. And it was quite a good read. It’s a Dr. Gideon Fell novel, a murder mystery set in Geneva and as usual with Carr the plot has several turns and twists.

Hope to be more active tomorrow. Arms and back are better today. May take another day off to recuperate then get back at it Wednesday. Got to get some more wood cut, split and in for the coming cold week and weekend. But that’s to worry about tomorrow. Now to find another book for the evening.

Too Many Books

Our new books site. Nothing much there right now, just a few placeholders. Still trying to get things worked out on how to sell books and stuff from Wordpress posts.

Brian Dettmer’s “Book Autopsies” — sliced book sculptures - Boing Boing

Talk about bits and pieces. Wonderful, tedious work!

Nero Wolfe

My Nero Wolfe paperback covers site. Not that I have done anything with it in ages. Just a link to possibly remind myself to got off the back of my lap and do something to/with it…

Biologists Helping Bookstores

This is some funny stuff! Folks helping bookstores out by putting the “Intelligent Design” books in the proper places.

No, not the trash or toilet, just a bit of relocating into the proper categories. Go to the site and read a bit to find out which categories these are.

Hand-forging and Wrought-iron Ornamental Work - Google Book Search

Another blacksmithing book online. Well worth the read, download, and reread.

Modern Blacksmithing: Rational Horse Shoeing and Wagon Making 1901

Another blacksmithing book at the same site. Haven’t looked at this one but considering the time of publication I suspect it will be worth the time to read also.

Farm Blacksmithing

Good basic info on blacksmithing. Seems that some of the illustrations are missing but could just be I missed them. Worth bookmarking if you are into working metal.

Modern Blacksmithing, 1904

Interesting book. Good info for anyone playing with smithing.

instructables : Handbound Book

Good article on book binding.

Boing Boing: Great bookmod: encyclopedia into scrapbook

The link on the Boing-Boing page goes nowhere as the “artist” has taken the site down as she seems more worried about someone using a picture of “her” work to promote or link back to “her” site than about sharing her ideas.

I have run into this blinders-on attitude quite a few times with “artists” trying to “protect” their “property”.  Thought then and think now that if they are that concerned about “their” work they don’t need to have a website in the first place.  The web is a place for sharing.  Get over it!

This is the pix that she has her knickers in a wad over:

Good concept, though I would have used string or rope or leather instead of wire to tie it all together.

Ottawa couple has self-help books covered

Funny book covers.  Interesting business idea.

Main Page - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

Quite a collection and growing constantly.