I have previously shared my bottle-green Virago shelf but I had many other lighter green books on my shelves and I brought those together to create the other green shelf.

First of all, there is NO Angela Carter book! I think this is the first shelf, other than the white one (and I do have a white Angela Carter book, but not on that shelf) that doesn’t include a book by my favourite writer. There are, of course, the obligatory Virago Modern Classics; this time they are both Barbara Pym novels and are new additions to my shelves this year. Penguin are as always well-represented in classics (one read and loved and the other currently unread), beautiful John Wyndham novels, and a Gabriel Garcia Marquez one (also a regular feature amongst the colour-themed shelves); Vintage also sneak onto the shelf yet again with another Rushdie novel.

The Rebecca Wells novel is also a new addition and is a vile shade of lime. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett is my all-time favourite Children’s novel and this is a beloved copy and one of the oldest books in my collection with Wild Swans by Jung Chang a close second (a fabulous autobiographical family history that has had a place on my shelves since 1997).

I am a Cat by Soseki Natsume is a Japanese classic that you will be reading about soon on my blog and the green Jasper Fforde books belong to great literary crime/fantasy novels and I adore the covers with their spoof beat-up appearance. Lastly on the shelf there is another vividly coloured TC Boyle spine.

I love green as a colour and like the freshness of this shelf, what about you?

I have exhausted the range of colours in my possession, covering the spectrum of the rainbow as well as some other core colours, so this will be the last in my colour-themed bookshelves series until I acquire more books! In the meantime, if the voyeur in you is seeking out then you can watch a vlog tour of Eva’s new rainbow bookshelves.

The beige shelf is just for fun; I noticed that I possessed a number of beige and cream books in my collection and I thought it would be interesting to see how effective they were en masse.

Penguin seem particularly inclined to use this shade for their books, single editions as well as the inexpensive classics and the Shakespeare series. Virago apparently like to employ a range of rainbow colours in for their covers, which explains why I have a couple of Viragoes on each rainbow shelf so far (well, that and the fact that I love Virago titles). On this shelf there is also the obligatory Angela Carter novels (this time edited by her); a seminal piece of feminist fiction, Fear of Flying by Erica Jong; some more drama (Irish as opposed to Shakespearean); a beloved Children’s literature classic; and a good selection of modern literary fiction including works by two of my favourite writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie. I also have to make special mention of one of my best reads this year: The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets by Eva Rice; I read a library copy but managed to pick up a pristine copy for a very good price in a remainders shop a couple of months ago.

Does this shelf pop for you, do you find it striking or altogether too beige?

Do you like the red shelf? My mind isn’t entirely made up about it perhaps due to the disparity in heights and hues. I also have a larger collection of Vintage Classics and together they would make a striking colour & publisher shelf like my silver Penguin Modern Classics one.

As for patterns, I don’t notice any overt publishing preferences except for Vintage Books but I do see a correlation between the colour red and children’s literature or the gothic novel. As with most of my other coloured shelves there is an Angela Carter title (actually a duplicate copy as Nights at the Circus was my first Carter novel and my favourite); a Virago Modern Classic; an Armistead Maupin Tales of the City book and a mixture of other books including an absurdist Irish play, Irish novella (both of which are highly recommended), a collection of short stories and contemporary fiction. When creating this shelf I could not exclude Dr Seuss.

During my rainbow bookshelves series I have been conscious that I had no yellow shelf to contribute. For some reason I don’t own many yellow books (and yet have an abundance seemingly in other colours); what I do have can be seen below in a little stack, minus a copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini that would have looked splendid itself in the pile but someone has borrowed it. However, Verity kindly offered to write a guest post as she -as you can see- has a yellow shelf! Welcome Verity and thank you for adding to my series.

I have greatly enjoyed Paperback Reader’s series of Rainbow coloured bookshelves, and having been wondering about creating my own, I couldn’t resist offering to do a guest post with yellow books when she said that she didn’t have a shelf-ful of volumes in this colour. I then discovered that some of my very favourite books are yellow.

The largest collection of yellow books in the middle of this picture are my Greyladies titles. I came across this imprint earlier in the year, and finally got around to reading some of the titles this year. The books fall into what I would describe as a genre of children’s books for grown-ups; they include some of Noel Streatfeild (writing as Susan Scarlett)’s lighter novels and include
adult school stories. I wrote about one of them here.

On the left, I have some non-fiction yellow books. Mrs Milburn’s diaries are the wonderful second-world war writings of a housewife and give a fantastic insight into life on the Home Front. The child that books built is also autobiographical, tracing the origin’s of Spufford’s love of reading. I picked up Cornish for beginners on holiday this year; I love Cornwall and hoped to pick up some of the language, but I haven’t yet got very far.

Deric Longden’s A play on words is fictionalised autobiography, and absolutely laugh-out-loud-hilarious; I discovered him whilst still at school, and bought this with one of my leaving prizes. I didn’t much enjoy Andrea Levy’s Small Island, but I adored her other books, including the yellow-sounding Fruit of the Lemon. The bee season was a book acquired cheaply in an offer from The Times and is the literary equivalent of the film Spellbound, tracing a young girl’s progress through school spelling bees. The ladies of lending is a library book with a title that grabbed me; as a librarian I love to read about others in the same role and I am looking forward to reading this one very soon.

The final two books relate to a current reading challenge – my attempt to read through all of the Virago Modern Classics. I read and reviewed the appropriately titled The yellow wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman back in August. And I acquired Excellent Women only last week to add to my collection of recently re-issued Barbara Pym books.

Thank you, Verity! I find it interesting that a lot of children’s books have yellow covers and wonder if whether that is why I have so few. In my stack below you will see that Verity and I share the aptly entitled The Yellow Wallpaper. I also have the latest books by Jasper Fforde and Salman Rushdie (published in 2007 and 2008, respectively); a thrift book; Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks (which has the appearance of a lovely children’s schoolbook); and one of Colette’s Claudine novels, which is by far one of my favourite series designs (by Vintage).

I have family visiting this weekend but as always I love your comments and will respond at some point over the weekend.

So, what do you think of my blue shelf? Again, in honour of my colour-themed bookshelves, this shelf was a spur-of-the-moment creation for the photo-op. Perhaps coincidental, I notice that there are a number of enchanting reads on this shelf, all magical in their own way. I love blue and the gradation of the colour from left to right, darker to bluer.

This isn’t the best photograph that I have ever taken and it also doesn’t do justice to the cavernous space of Foyles bookshop but I did promise an indoors image for my Bookshops series of posts. This is an appendix to my first post of the series. I love wandering around this shop, especially the General Fiction, some of which (F-H) are shown above, along with the Graphic Novel section and some great display tables; the table directly facing the camera currently hosts a lovely selection of Pushkin Press texts, which I had never paid much attention to before.

Around the corner, display bookshelves can be found including this one. The rainbow table was the inspiration for my bookshelves of many colours series and this has moved to a bookcase. I think that striking and creative displays in bookshops are an inventive use of resources and excites me as a book buyer. Do you find that interesting displays -tables, shelves, or gondolas by colour, prize-winners, or setting- are more likely to attract you to a book and make you more inclined to buy it?