It all started Sunday night when I decided it was finally time to update JALC’s header image.

Strike that: it all started almost 2 years ago, when I recommitted to my blogging and decided to use my collection of “badass lady Pops” as a recurring motif in the pictures accompanying some of my posts. (One and two.)*

The first trumpeting of that motif was an attempt to use the full collection as the banner image here on JALC.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t properly thought through the actual proportions of the banner image in this particular WordPress template, so the banner image ended up being less the panoramic wonder I’d imagined and more of an awkward, semi-pixellated closeup of approximately half of my early-2019 lineup.

To wit:

Now I was kind of annoyed about it, but I’m also super-lazy, and I didn’t have a quick and easy way to rearrange the collection in two rows, especially since they were all arrayed at the very front edge of an overstuffed bookshelf. So that banner image continued to appear on JALC for all the intervening months between then and now.

But here’s the thing: this particular shelf is one of the bookshelves that gets cleared off annually so I can set up my Solstice Village. Which meant that I had a precise window of opportunity—after packing up the houses but before UNpacking the Shakespeare books—where I could jury-rig some display shelves and create a new banner image that better matched the template proportions.

Side benefit: this would also allow me to show off the expanded collection I’ve built in the last 24 months.

And that image went live on JALC Sunday night.

So the first thing to notice here is that yes, the collection has grown significantly. There’s Buffy and Faith, Zoe and Kaylee from Firefly, Rosie the Riveter and RBG, Mary Poppins, Melinda May, the 13th Doctor, Beverly Marsh from It, and the first Black Canary I fangirled over.

The second thing to notice is that the second level display “shelf” is shorter than I’d want it to be for real, and you can see the obnoxious bright white of the styrofoam I used to “build” it way more obviously than I prefer.**

Now, the third thing may or may not be something you agree with. But the third thing I noticed (and with which Mr. Mezzo concurs) is how fucking cool this gallery looks.

So we’re planning to get some real display shelves and leave these badass ladies out for good.

Which is super-cool.

AND.

Which means we’re losing a bookshelf.

Now: we’re readers in this household. And we have a lot of books. And yes, I’m making some progress here and there to thin out the home library, and my discipline in creating this year’s challenge lists out of books already in the house means I should make good further progress on that during 2021.

Still, ain’t no way, no how, that I’ve cleared two-and-a-half feet of extra shelf space. So I guess I’m gonna have to figure out where the Shakespeare books will be living now.

(Or, if I just move Shakes to a different shelf in the living room, where those other displaced books will be living.)

It’s a capsule demonstration of the law of unintended consequences. Good ones and annoying ones.

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*I really need to start doing that again.

** We’re building some flat-box furniture, so we had a bunch of that lying around.

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Image credits: all photos taken by the author, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.