Gratuitous and overly artistic photos from the ephemera warehouse

Regular readers (and thank heavens for all of you) are probably aware that (1) I often joke about the cavernous Otto books and ephemera warehouse in our basement and (2) I've been doing a LOT of sorting and cleaning lately, as evidenced, for example, by this post and this one and this one.

This round of cleaning is nearly complete, and the books room doesn't look anything like it did a few weeks ago. Knowing this would be the case, and knowing that a messy, disorganized collection of books has a certain beauty to it, I took some photos before I got started, to document how things looked at that fleeting moment in time.

Of course, this being me, I went with gratuitously artistic angles and clichéd sepia tones. I thought that fit in well with the aged and vintage nature of all these books and papers...