At first I thought they were just some random, thematically similar books painted together, but when I thought of it as a person’s “portrait” (idealized or otherwise) it took on another dimension.

For a while, I’ve been documenting people’s bookshelves as a form of portraiture; you can actually learn a lot about folks by their books’ covers. Now, I’m working on a series of “ideal” bookshelves: sets of favorites—mine or someone else’s—amalgamated in a picture, even if they don’t usually live on shelves anywhere near each other.

It does give me pause, wondering whether a sight like that, books grouped together on a shelf, will one day appear as quaint as a shelf full of records, cassettes, or VHS tapes—after having finally been obsoleted by the Kindle, the iPad, their descendants.