Ever since I started blogging, it’s bugging me that I haven’t taken more pictures of my shelves over the years. I had so many different shelves and a million different arrangements since I feel like I’m reordering my books once a week to fit in all the new additions.

There is only one shelf that’s been with me since the beginning. Yesterday, when I tried to clean up my room but got sidetracked by a stack of photos I came upon in one of my drawers, I found two pictures of this very shelf which were taken in 2004 – 10 years ago. Unfortunately, it seems as if I was only keen on taking pictures of my horse novels so the shelf with the non-horse books is cut and there’s no picture from the top shelf.

It’s fun to see the changes over the last 10 years. The number of books I own exploded, the number of shelves I have, too, and all in all, my room is a little library and the dream of every book lover. However, I will give you the current situation in another post for it would be totally beyond the scope of one post.

Sorry for the bad quality but the scanner messed it up. Klick to enlarge. So here we go: the annotated bookshelf of 13-year-old me!

1. Top shelf: what’s missing?

   At least 13 books. Unfortunately, I cannot reconstruct the whole shelf since I only started my book data tables in 2008. However, I know of two novels that should be there:
   – Laura und das Geheimnis von Aventerra (Laura, #1) by Peter Freund
   – Laura und das Siegel der Sieben Monde (Laura, #2) by Peter Freund

2. PonyClub (Book Club) Part 1

   Both the old (=white) and the new standalones as well as short series and paperbacks found a place here. Noteworthy: I haven’t started to sort them by colour yet. As you will see in the next post, that’s how I handle the standalones now.
   I became a member in March 2002 but borrowed quite a couple of them from my friend who had been a member from the end of 1998 to the beginning of 2001. This image tells me that I have already bought her collection and incorporated it into mine and started to hunt down the missing ones, which is evident in there being so many old standalones. The layout changed somewhere around 2000, if I remember correctly.
   I bought a lot of them at our local “baby bazaar,” which is a specific type of flea market that sells baby and childrens’ clothes, toys, books, and a couple of other things aimed at children. However, I also got a couple of them on the Internet from other members and – yeah, it’s a little crazy – from e-bay. At the tender age of 12, I became an e-bay professional. Naturally, it was my dad’s account but I was pretty much allowed to have free rein. Of the ~250 transactions since Oct 2003 at least 230 are mine – and since there were a lot of bundles, you can imagine that the number of books I own exploded.

3. PonyClub Part 2

   Longer series:
   – Mustang Mountain Ranch: I have no idea where Das Wildpferd (OT: Wild Horse) is. It should be right between the hardcover and the paperback.
   – Diabolo
   – Aileen (OT: Ashleigh)
   – Vollblut (OT: Thoroughbred): I’m actually surprised that I had already have all of the first 10 in 2004. Especially 2-5 were incredibly hard to obtain and I paid a lot of money for them. But it was so worth it! The Thoroughbred series became one of my favourites and introduced me to horse racing which inspired my Facharbeit (a research paper of about 20 pages I had to write for my A-levels).

1. Non-Fiction and Nuja

   So, on the far left we have a package of the PonyClub book club. I’ve no idea why this is there. Most of the shelf is non-fiction except for the three green novels with yellow lettering in the middle. That’s the Nuja trilogy. Originally, I had my mum’s books, but they were in bad condition and she didn’t own the second installment so I bought the whole trilogy on e-bay. Random fact: There’s a horse called Cara in the third one.  On the left are my horse non-fiction books including some PonyClub ones and on the right are the PonyClub photo story novels and a wild mixture of non-fiction on cats, nature, painting and drawing, a couple of lexica and basically everything concerning the earth.

2. Horse Novels 

   Just a couple of comments:
   – The 12 novels on the left with the little horseshoe on the back are the Ponyhof Kleines Hufeisen series. It’s a really popular series in Germany and almost every horse lover I met has read at least one of them. The 10th was my first horse novel and it’s the first novel I remember reading and loving so it’s the one that turned me into a readingrat.
   – The 7 colourful ones are part of the Pferdeparadies Weidenhof series, one of my all-time favourite horse series. It’s about two girls solving horse related crimes.
   – The three omnibus editions and the three novels on the far right are part of the Bille & Zottel series, which is another popular series in Germany although it’s actually more or less a generation older than me so I got them from my mum. Can I tell you a ‘secret’? I own the whole series (21 novels in total) and have only read the first 4 so far. Story of my TBR pile.

3. Chaotic mix of everything

   Well, this is so chaotic it actually makes my fingers twitch. I can’t believe I didn’t order them by height. I have to admit that I don’t have most of them anymore. I gave some of them to my sister and what happend to the others I don’t know. They are probably in a cupboard in our cellar.
   – The box set on the left with the yellowish-blue colour is my dad’s Hobbit/Lord of the Rings collection. I read them when I was 10 or 11 years old and hated them back then but I couldn’t let go of the pretty box.
   – The green one with the red lettering in the middle is Das Geheimnis der Spinnenhexe, one of my all-time favourite high fantasy novels.
   – Where the hell is Harry Potter 2?! It really should be there!

Btw, that white thing on the left is my communion dress and on the lowest shelf are the IKEA slipcases that house my horse magazines (mostly Wendy but also Peggy, Lissy, and Jessy – I’m always wondering why they all end in -y).

Any questions?