Shelf Esteem is a weekly measure of the books on the shelves of writers, editors, and other word lovers, as told to Emily M. Keeler. This week’s shelf belongs to Lindsay Gibb, who is the editor of Broken Pencil, and the library services coordinator for beloved Toronto comix shop, The Beguiling. She shares her life and bookshelves with her partner, cartoonist and illustrator Matthew Daley. His comic, The Pig Sleep, has been nominated for the Joe Shuster award this year. Gibb kept looking toward Daley for verification on details having to do with their shared book collection, and near the end of my visit, I asked if they both wanted to be photographed. Gibb said, “You talked, Matt, so you’re probably going to be in this.” He did, and is, along with their cat, Mistress Muffin.
We keep all our bookshelves in Matt’s office. We kind of reorganized the space this year. We used to have the bookshelves in the living room, but then decided that we have a lot of art and needed a spot to put it. And Matt really likes that he has the library in his office. It’s all combined, except for one shelf. We keep all of the graphic novels and children’s books on this shelf. Most of it’s Matt’s, but some of this stuff belongs to me. I think most of the comics I’ve brought in, I bought after we put this here. He rules this, and I don’t really know how it’s organized. Right now, I think it’s organized by size? I always have to ask Matt if I want to read anything that’s on here, and he’ll find it for me.
I have a lot of film studies books. We have a shelf in our bedroom—I had my film studies books in there, and some writing-related books, and and some photography books, and knitting books. The knitting books are still in there, but everything else is here. We have fiction arranged in a sort of alphabetical order, and then non-fiction is kind of by subject. Let’s see, this looks like job-related stuff, here’s some comics-related stuff, and over here there’s music, and here there’s kind of, um, thought-related stuff... Psychology, philosophy, cultural studies. And then knitting stuff that isn’t patterns.
Shelf Esteem runs every Tuesday.
