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# I Put My Bookshelves on the Internet
- URL: https://christingeorge.com/i-put-my-bookshelves-on-the-internet/
- Published: 2026-10-06T14:48:58.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-06T14:48:58.000Z
- Description: I photographed three bookcases, had Claude read 535 spines, and rebuilt them as a library page where visitors can rearrange my books.
- Author: Christin Emmanuel George
- Tags: Projects, Build, Books, AI in Practice, The Workshop

Anyone who has been to my house knows the quickest way to understand me is to stand in front of my bookshelves for five minutes. This site is supposed to be a digital version of me, and until this week it had no shelves.

So I photographed three bookcases, shelf by shelf, and Claude read every spine and logged the title, author, size, colour and position. The [library page](link) now has 535 books on it, each drawn as its own spine at roughly its real height and thickness, in the place it actually sits. Books lying flat are drawn flat. One bookcase is stacked two and three rows deep, and the page can spread it out or collapse it back to how it really is, with the hidden rows tucked behind the front ones.

The things that live on the shelves came along too. Over the years we have had five cats. Cats are curious, [cats](https://christingeorge.com/probably-the-cat/) like knocking things off surfaces, and curios are breakable, so the safest place to show them off is behind doors, which is where the books already were. There is a painted boomerang and a wooden duck in polka-dot boots. Three owls play instruments beside a coconut-shell Elephant, a teddy bear sits on top of one case, and fairy lights run along the back of every row.

My real shelves are sorted partly by colour and partly by nothing at all, and the page opens that way. After that it will do what the real ones won't without an afternoon of lifting. A colour sort turns a whole bookcase into a rainbow. It can stack the books into a skyline or lay them out as piano keys, for no reason except that it can. Pick [Malazan](https://christingeorge.com/tolkiens-saddest-scene-has-no-villain-in-it/) and the rest of the shelf fades.

I built this by talking to Claude, which makes it far too easy to ask for one more thing. I asked for the bookcases to stand on a turning 3D ring with real depth. It looked wrong, then it stopped loading at all, and we went back to a plain row of shelves that open when clicked. I have spent years telling teams to cut scope.

Somewhere in all the sorting I started wondering whether this is a product. Rearranging a real bookcase costs an afternoon, and nobody knows whether the new arrangement is better until the last book is back in. With a few photographs, every arrangement can be tried on a screen first, without lifting a single book.

It might also just be a good way to switch off. I want the books to slide more smoothly than they do now, and I'm thinking about soft music, so that tidying a stranger's shelves becomes something to do to relax. I'd also like to see every book I own on one massive shelf, which no wall in my house could hold.

Meanwhile, my shelves are the test. Drag any book anywhere, sort them, build something I haven't thought of. If you think my shelves are badly organised, you can now show me, somehow. I haven't worked out how your arrangement gets back to me, or how the good ones get onto the site, but both will happen.

There is still a bookcase and a half to photograph, and a handful of spines nobody could read. My Gotham Comics sit in stacks behind stacks and haven't been scanned at all. For now, this shelf is literally comic sans.