On Facebook, Jason Gagnon posts this photo of an illustrated staircase, and asks his wife, “Laura, please can we do this?”
Internet, please ask Laura to say YES! If Julie and I ever build a house, we will have to build a second floor just so we can have a staircase like this one. Julie says, “Just think of the discussion about which titles to include.”
sdb says: That’s fantastic!
Mike says: Definitely not decorated for resale.
AnotherBeliever says: Oh man, that’s brilliant. It almost makes me wish I owned the house I’m living in currently. It’s a two-storey duplex, and I’m on the top floor, so there’s a flight of stairs at the front of the apartment going up, and a whole other flight going down into the backyard out one side. All those stairs. All those book spines. I just counted – 15 each, 30 total. Where to begin:
The Bible at the top, then, in as-yet-undetermined-order: Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, the Once and Future King, The Princess Bride, A Swiftly Moving Planet, The Dark is Rising, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Dune, Chronicles of Narnia, Dragonsinger, Bujold’s Memory, The Language Instinct, The Gates of Fire, The Sacred Way, Surprised by Joy, Mere Christianity, The Divine Conspiracy, The Pocket Thomas Merton, Affluenza, Rise to Globalism, The End of Education, The Well-Trained Mind, On Killing, The Closed Circle, Stolen Valor, Honor: A History, The Omnivore’s Dilemna, A Peace to End All Peace, Collapse, and of course, Crunchy Cons.
Sam M says: Don’t just think of the discussion; have it!
For the sake of discussion, I looked at me stairs. There are 16. So… What makes the cut?
This is the ultimate in signaling. Too serious, and you look like a jerk. If you choose stuff that’s too obvious… You’re a lightweight. Wooh boy!
My no-brainer, no question asked, non-negotiables, prior to the wife’s input:
Confederacy of Dunces
Fear and Loathing
Lord of the Flies
Ham on Rye
Walden
The Ginger Man
To Kill a Mockingbirf
The Fountainhead
Trilobites and Other Stories
See, this is harder than the books you’d have on a deserted island. It’s all show. It’s what you want others to see.
Wow. I’m a drunk!
AnotherBeliever says: This is terrific fun. Who else gots a list? 
brians says: Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost, & the Geneva Study Bible. I tried to un-Reform, but I just can’t: last of the Puritans, I am.
Sigh. It’s so lonely here on TAC.
AnotherBeliever says: You aren’t the only Protestant at least! Though I’m not a very reformed-church one. Sort of drifted to Anglican in the past few years…
Uncle Vanya says: The Name of the Rose
Brideshead Revisited
The Razor’s Edge
The Lessons of History, by Will and Ariel Durant
The Nicomachean Ethics
Huckleberry Finn
The Stranger
The Magic Mountain
An American Tragedy
The Power and the Glory
The Brothers Karamazov
Not necessarily in the order listed above.
Roland de Chanson says: I just looked at my favorite fifteen books and I am going to do this. The only problem is the spines are different thicknesses. The carpenter is coming to day to modify the risers.
I just decided my first choice is a book called CRUNCHY CONS (How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or at Least the Republican Party).
I think I have to widen one stair. Maybe even the hall.
Douglas LeBlanc says: This image reminds me of this staircase at Square Books in Oxford, Miss., one of the finest independent bookshops in the United States.
Jason Gagnon says: She said yes!
The steps all have lips that extend out over the riser below, so there’s room for me to try and do something to insert, rather than paint directly on the riser. This would also have the advantage of letting me change them out, as well as not having something permanent, and I could get a little fancier than merely painting.
But what books?!
Rough list:
Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Human Scale by Kirkpatrick Sale
Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkein
Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkein
Pride & Prejudice- Jane Austen
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
The Sun also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
The Dharma Bums- Jack Keroac
Tuck Everlasting – Natalie Babbitt
For the Life of the World – Alexander Schmemann
I can’t do it right now – the stairs are steep and we get little people going up and down, but someday.
What books depends on whether the kids get to pick or I do. Oh, heck, the kids will get to pick.
Understood Betsy
The Wind in the Willows
Rascal
Treasure Island
My Side of the Mountain
Farmer Boy
Captains Courageous
The Birchbark House
Huckleberry Finn
Heidi
The Hobbit
Rikki Tikki Tavi
Love it!
Roland de Chanson says: I just thought of another way to do this. You could copy real book spines on a scanner and then cut and paste them in a paint-type program so that you have a horizonal row of vertically standing books. Then print them and paste them on the stairs. Voilà – removable and switchable. But maybe not very durable.
I can’t think straight with all the noise the carpenters are making.
So many books, so few stairs. Here’s my rough list, in no particular order:
Lolita–Vladimir Nabokov
White Noise–Don DeLillo
Crash–J.G. Ballard
Decline and Fall–Evelyn Waugh
United States: Essays 1952-1992–Gore Vidal
Beyond Good and Evil–Friedrich Nietzsche
A Mencken Chrestomathy–H.L. Mencken
The Magus–John Fowles
The Picture of Dorian Gray–Oscar Wilde
The Devil’s Dictionary–Ambrose Bierce
Till We Have Faces–C.S. Lewis
The Time Machine-H.G. Wells
Revolt Against the Modern World–Julius Evola
The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats
The Decline of the West–Oswald Spengler
So many great books have delighted me that I’d need the escalator from Powell and Pressburger’s “A Matter of Life and Death” to do them justice.
Rod Dreher says: I was thinking last night about which titles I would choose for my bibliophile staircase. Do I have 12? The books that have most influenced me, or the books that I think are the best ever written, aren’t necessarily the books I would choose for the staircase. I would see the staircase as a kind of icon shelf: these are the titles I would recommend that people regard as a kind of ladder into my imagination, if not strictly my beliefs. In that sense, I would choose:
“A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole
“The Deptford Trilogy” by Robertson Davies
“The Seven Storey Mountain” by Thomas Merton
“The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien
“Paris To The Moon” by Adam Gopnik
“Collected Works Of Flannery O’Connor”
“The Little Way of Ruthie Leming” by me!
“Life Is A Miracle” by Wendell Berry
“Gumbo Ya-Ya” by Lyle Saxon
“The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth” by Roy Andries de Groot
“How To Cook Everything” by Mark Bittman
“The Code of the Woosters,” by P.G. Wodehouse
David J. White says: About 25 years ago I toured the chateau in Chantilly in France (ca. 18th cent.), and in one room, the walls looks as if they were lined with bookshelves. A closer look revealed that it was actually molded bas-relief wallpaper made to look like books on bookshelves — and the titles on the spines of the faux books were titles of famous works from antiquity that have not survived to the present, or have survived only in fragments (e.g., the Annales of Ennius). Very clever!
Uncle Vanya says: “Collected Works Of Flannery O’Connor”
You really are a Southerner!
(BTW, good choices.)
Jason Gagnon says: Further thoughts: If you make insertable book bindings, you could exchange them out for holiday themed books come Christmas time. I hate taking out the Christmas dishes (really, the one set is fine!) but changing out the staircase books? That’s something I wouldn’t mind pulling out of the basement.
AnotherBeliever says: LOL @ Roland, that Crunchy Con stair sure is gonna be a tricky one for your houseguests.
Roland de Chanson says: Another Believer:
It’s done. Great carpenters, done in a day. Exactly to specs. Long live Irish illegals!
It’s probably my fault but the third step is War and Peace and the fourth is Old Man and the Sea.
I’ve tripped three times coming down. My wife is in a coma and with a slipped disk from negotiating The Encyclopedia Brittanica to The Letters of Héloïse.
Also, my son came over and was clotheslined by the seventh step which has now protruded into the living room. The neck brace comes off in a week, I think. Casualty of Crunchy Cons (etc ..)
Also, the dog has two broken legs. I’ll be dragging him for his poop in the morning.
But all in all I like it. And I’m inviting my mother-in-law for the weekend. Unless my wife revives. She’ll probably warn the old crone.
Uncle Vanya says: Roland de Chanson: “I’ve tripped three times coming down. My wife is in a coma and with a slipped disk from negotiating The Encyclopedia Brittanica to The Letters of Héloïse.
Sounds as if you should slip in “Gray’s Anatomy.”
AnotherBeliever says: LOL @ Vanya and Roland. Oh, this blog and its commenters are a delight. The internet will be nicer when the elections are over, but y’all make it more than bearable.
A real bibliophile would have build bookcases right into the stairs.