My new arch nemesis: book shelves

First of all, this is really embarrassing. My arch nemesis is a class of inanimate objects. I've gone from being justifiably feared to being bested by ply wood. It's ignominious.

The book shelf conflict extends back as far as I remember, but it is only recently that the enemy has started actively fighting back.

Book shelves started out as nothing more than a hard problem. In middle school, I started reading a lot. I bought books. Other people bought books for me. And since I enjoy rereading novels, I didn't get rid of any. They started to accumulate. It was a gradual thing, and equally gradually, I started appropriating other sets of shelves in the house, as the ones in my room were inadequate.

Cut to college. I had a new problem, although I didn't realize it for years. My book collection had, up until college, been mostly limited to paperback novels. College text books are generally not paperback sized. Mostly, they're large, hardback beasts weighing multiple pounds. They're massive enough that carrying more than one at a time in a backpack is decidedly unpleasant. And by the end of my fourth year in college, I'd collected a lot of them. In addition, I'd also been slowly building up a respectable showing of art books. Art books showcase the work of particular artists or styles or movements, so they have to be large and full color.

I was justifiably proud of my book case by senior year (pt 1). It was small, but it boasted the texts of not one but two majors. The giantish presences of Dali and Raphael stood in company with the foundations of computer science. It was, in point of fact, a source of great pride.

The enemy must have sensed this, for it struck with calculated vengeance. It could not have picked a more inopportune time: this was the last night of my stay in Pittsburgh. Chris' parents and another housemate and his family had come up for graduation. Having abandoned all hope of eating at a restaurant, the college students were trying to coordinate the culinary efforts of two families in order to get dinner on the table. We did it, and I was relaxing after a good meal when I was prompted to grab something out of my room.

My room was a disaster zone. And for those of you who have seen my bedroom on a regular basis, I must stress that it was a lot worse than you're imagining. My book shelves had, in point of fact, collapsed. The shelving itself had been violently ripped off the legs and the whole unit had fallen forward, vomiting the masters of the Italian Renaissance across the room like so much bad Sri Lankan chicken. Some of the less hardy volumes were being irreparably mangled under the weight of their colossal counterparts.

You'll recall that this was the night before I had to leave, and we had company. The best I could do was to neatly pile the books and forget about it for the summer. When I returned in the fall, I went to Ikea and brought back a new set of shelves which have served me well ever since.

...until Yesterday. I noticed that Something Was Wrong. The books were not vertical, the shelves were far from horizontal, and the sides had come unpegged from everything. At this point, it was fixable. Ikea's famous peg system is fairly forgiving. I started removing the books with the intention of fitting the shelves back together. However, plywood was never meant to be a structural building material. The screws got torqued and ripped it to shreds, rendering the shelves useless.

So now, I must once again admit defeat. And furthermore, I am in the market for new shelves. And this time, they'll be made of real wood.