The Book Blogger Hop was originally created by Jennifer @ Crazy-For-Books With Jennifer’s permission, Billy @ Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer relaunched the hop. Each week there will be a weekly prompt featuring a book related question.

Question:

What creative places do you keep books other than your bookshelves? (submitted by Elizabeth @ Complex Chaos)

I’ll admit right now that I’m not very creative; I just have a lot of bookcases! In fact, it used to be that you could find at least one bookcase in each room of the house except the bathrooms. And I didn’t have enough room to display all my books, so they were kept in bins in our 12 x 12 bomb shelter, so I guess that’s sort of creative. How many of you can say you have a bomb shelter where you can store things? I also have a small box by my recliner where I do the bulk of my reading that holds my most pressing reads because I don’t have an end table there.

But the past few years I’ve been purging tons of books so I could display what remained and just to declutter in general. I jettisoned boxes upon boxes of children’s books that the kids had outgrown (I never could resist the library book sale on bag day: fill a paper grocery bag for $6 or 2/$10), as well as almost a full bookcase of cookbooks. I started buying books on Kindle a few years ago of books I already owned and started donating the physical copy. Finally, after years of being in boxes, out came the Nancy Drews and other children’s series books I collected in my teens and 20’s. There are still a few boxes of books in the bomb shelter, but nowhere near as many as there used to be.

Now the majority of my books are on display in our basement, in the former playroom in wall-to-wall bookcases and shelves. In fact, that whole part of the basement is media central. All our CDs (yes, we still keep and use those) and DVDs and BluRays and even a few choice VHS tapes (yes, we still have a VCR/DVD recorder) are on display. The lighting is terrible down there, but now at least when I want a piece of media, I have a pretty good idea where it is.

What about you? Do you have any creative places for storing your books? Drop a line in the comments!