Zane Grey Bookshelf

A shelf to fit the books

My mom acquired a collection of Zane Grey books from her father, and she asked me if I could make a bookshelf for them. There were a couple twists and turns, but to make a long story short, it took me a really long time to get around to the project.

It was originally going to be a completely different design (it was going to match another piece of old furniture), and then I acquired some Maple wood that needed time to air dry (thanks Tom!), and then...sometimes it's just hard to get started.

When I sat down to sort out the problem, I ended up designing the bookshelf after the books themselves. Afterall, they have pretty stylish covers with some details I could use to strengthen the connection between the books and the shelf. Here's a picture of one of the books (not my picture).

Since I was going to be using Maple wood, I noticed the similarity in color between the tweed (maybe that's not the right term) of the cover, and the pale color of the Maple wood. I began to look at the book design from a different perspective (also not my picture).

Let's back up a step. As is wonderfully described in a new book I'm reading, The Why & How of Woodworking by Michael Pekovich (thanks Justin!), furniture is born of function first. That is, if it's a bookshelf, it needs to effectively hold the books it's supposed to hold.

I knew how many books were in the collection (something like 65...I had it written down when it was important), and I knew the size of the books. From that, I tried out some options between various numbers of shelves and the width to arrive at a shelf I felt was a comfortable size and would properly hold all the books.

This is when I started to think about the styling of the books a bit more, and I began to test out mimicking the colors of the cover on the shelf.

Just the red and blue color wasn't enough though. There's a couple other design elements on the books, and I felt I could use those. The first is a little sunset emblem:

I used the sun and horizon part of this on the bottom of the bookshelf as a cutout shape. It worked perfectly to create the feet needed for stability, and I could use it on the front and the sides.

The second part was the bull head (ram head, bull head, some kind of head):

I thought this would be a perfect emblem to have on the sides of the bookshelf, just like it was the spine of the book.

I had a design. All I had to do now was build it.

Starting with the sawn Maple lumber:

After thickness planing:

Begin processing into cut boards and rough shelves:

The base comes together, and some more finishing on the shelves:

Masking and priming to prepare for the painting (which was scary!):

After cutting out a paper stencil to give myself a rough pencil line, I hand-painted the...animal head on each side with metallic gold paint.

As an extra detail, I use some Black Walnut plugs on the top to break up the otherwise plain Maple.

And the best part of all, it actually holds books!

Thanks for being patient, mom.