Last year was the year of the selfie and this year VISI has every intention of making it the year of the shelfie! The shelfie is a picture of your bookshelf, whether filled with books, plants, collectibles or photos. We’ve put together a fun pop quiz to help you figure out what shelfie you are and have decor ideas for each personality type in the gallery above. When you’re done, snap a shelfie in your home and send it to us to stand the chance of winning a prize.

Show us what shelfie you are and win!

Snap a shelfie and send it to us on web@visi.co.za or via Twitter @VISImag #shelfie. The deadline for entries is Wednesday 28 May 2014 and we have some fantastic books up for grabs – two copies of Obie Oberholzer’s Karoo, three copies of Dominique Botha’s False River, two copies of Eben Venter’s Wolf Wolf (one in English, one in Afrikaans), and one copy of the Ardmore monograph.

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Selfies are so last year! Our friends at MB Life asked five local personalities to share their shelfies – pictorial peeks at their bookshelves.

Milisuthando Bongela, blogger

I don’t have as impressive a bookshelf as I would like, but it’s growing slowly and I’ve read all the books on it. My bookshelf came with my place; it’s embedded in the wall. My favourite place to read is in bed, when I wake up or just before I go to sleep. Three of my favourite books on my shelf are Frontiers: The Epic Creation of South Africa and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People by Noel Mostert – I call it the book that woke me up, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – the book that encouraged me to tell stories, and The Prophet by Khalil Gibran – the book I live by.

Zubz, musician and writer

My bookshelf is one of my favourite pieces of furniture in my house. It was custom-made to fit my wall and is a distressed-looking dusty green. It’s a prominent piece because my girlfriend and I are writers, and books occupy a big part of our lives. My favourite place to read is in my bedroom or curled up on the couch. I recently bought two Chinua Achebe books that I felt were essential to any African literature collection. I’m also big on Malcolm Gladwell’s books for inspiration. There’s also a lot of Toni Morrison on our bookshelf because my girlfriend is a huge fan and swears I’m missing out by not having read her books.

Angie Batis, co-owner of Wolves Café in Jozi, with her husband Shane Durrant, from Desmond and the Tutus

Shane and I designed our bookshelf and had a carpenter make it up for us. We wanted something with loads of big compartments because I love collecting things and wanted lots of nice little spaces to display them. My favourite place to read is on the porch of Shane’s mom’s holiday cottage in Riet River in the Eastern Cape. It’s so quiet and there are day beds so when it rains you get a blanket and some sweet tea and then it’s just you, your book and the sea in the background. It’s amazing. Paul Auster was one of the first authors I fell in love with. The first book of his I read was The New York Trilogy and his style of story-telling had me hooked from day one. He’s definitely worth checking out.

Nzinga Qunta, founder of JUCYAfrica.com and newscaster on ANN7

My bookshelf is from my varsity days – I just wandered into a shop and bought the first one I saw. I should probably get a new one since my place is heaving with books. I like to read on the couch or in bed; somewhere quiet where I can disappear into the places the book takes me. One of my favourite books is Eight Days in September by Frank Chikane. It was fascinating to read about South Africa’s biggest political story by a person who was involved. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is another favourite – she’s incredible at capturing emotion and weaving a beautiful story. Roots by Alex Haley taught me about the slave trade in a manner that portrayed how evil it was and how its effects still linger.

Tehn Diamond, rapper

There is no story behind my bookshelf. It’s quite literally a shelf in my closet. I keep my little treasures tucked away safely right at the back. My best reading place is in the bathtub – and I use my iPad. One of my favourite books include The Pleasures Of The Damned, the definitive collection of Charles Bukowski’s poems. It helped me get through a rough patch earlier this year. I flicked through a couple pages and landed on a poem called “The Harder You Try”, which ended with “… if there is light, it will find you”. Once I read that, a huge weight was lifted from my soul. I could breathe again, I was content to just be and wait patiently for whatever would come next. Another favourite is Empire State of Mind by Zack O’Malley Greenburg. It’s a really dope behind-the-scenes look at the business moves of one of my music industry heroes, Jay Z. I’m a massive fan of both Jay Z the musician and Jay Z the businessman, so this book was Christmas twice over.

Click here to do our shelfie quiz. We’ve put together a fun pop quiz to help you figure out what shelfie you are and have decor ideas for each personality type. When you’re done, snap a shelfie in your home and send it to us to stand the chance of winning a prize. 

Originally published on MB Life.

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Houses reflect their owners. Writer and journalist, Lin Sampson, first fell in love with her house in Cape Town nearly 30 years ago and has barely changed a thing about it. Her key decor element? Books!

I had just returned from Greece in 1980 when I came across this house in a cobbled street in an unfashionable part of town, but it had an old Cape Town charm with a view over the harbour and a tang of salt in the air. It was evening and I remember there were lighted candles in the interior’s flickering penumbra. It released a sense of solitude and remoteness that I had long loved.

Austerity has always attracted me and this house expressed within its shabbiness, hanging shutters and blocked fireplaces, a sense of the past – all the macerations, austerities, meditations and penances that make up the country in which we live.

I had been living in a house in Anafiotika above the Plaka in Athens, in a whitewashed room (all the houses kept a bucket of whitewash on hand, together with a long pole with which to daub at dirty spots in the manner of cleaning a carpet), with a rough cross incised on a lintel over the doorway.

When I was young I longed for plush, perhaps because my parents scorned it. They sought out old cottages with demented walls and leaking roofs in unfashionable areas, always “below the line”. Once we lived in a tower with no bathroom, once in a stable. We seldom had hot water and I still don’t have it.

Decor unheard of

There was never any possible notion of interior decorating and yet, looking back, our houses were so pretty, with just one or two pieces – inherited of course. My mother used to say about others, “She is one of those unfortunate women who didn’t inherit her furniture and had to buy it.”

Sofas and chairs were always slip covered, tied at the back like ball gowns, and one of my jobs was to help get them back into their slips after they had been washed (and shrunk). It’s one of the few skills I still retain (I wonder if there is any money in it?). Decor was unheard of, not even in a dictionary.

I had a friend at school whose mother “redid her lounge” every year. I longed for a redone lounge – although this was a word we were absolutely never allowed to use, so much so that when I became engaged to a man who said “lounge”, I was forced to break it off. And in case you think this was before World War I, my niece, who got engaged last year, admitted to us nervously, “I do have to tell you something about him. He says ‘lounge’.” If she had said he was a paedophile, we would not have been more shocked.

I have always been astounded at how much time South Africans spend on doing up or undoing their houses. They seem to be so obsessed with bathrooms, kitchens and off-street parking that if you offered them Sissinghurst (Vita Sackville-West’s house), they’d ask, “Has it got main en-suite and is there off-street parking?”

When I bought my house, it had the Trappist simplicity sometimes seen in early Scandinavian homes. There was a slab of old pink marble under a fig tree, bare boarded floors and internal shutters. I discovered long after I bought it that it had a superb view over the harbour, but I have always thought views overrated.

The late writer and taste terrorist Bruce Chatwin (who, when I last saw him, was living in one room with a shower in Albany in Piccadilly) once said, “It was one of those awful houses with a view.” To me there is nothing worse than those over-marbled mausoleums on the Atlantic Seaboard with “a view”. What do you think outside is for?

“In the middle of renovating”

In those days I was an interior decorator. I got so sick of people saying, “Oh, this house has got such potential,” that I put a pile of bricks in the hallway and said, “I am just in the middle of renovating”. Ten years later, the pile was still there – and nothing has changed.

I hate:

• scatter cushions
• four glass vases, each containing one flower (usually a protea)
• too much curtain swagged, padded, frilled and puddled on the ground (but I do love short curtains run up by hand)
• travertine (it should all be taken to a crematorium)
• white slippery tiles scattered with what people call Persian carpets (there are about two real Persian carpets in the world, and I can assure you they are not in your house or mine)
• bad pictures (you don’t have to buy South African pictures because you are South African – the world is full of wonderful paintings for quarter the price; the worst is a mediocre picture or, God forbid, a photograph with a little light above it)
• Bourne-Gleemed floors – I love plain scrubbed floors or even cement.

In the end, a house is where you live; it is not a stage, and it takes a lifetime to create. The houses I remember: explorer Wilfred Thesiger’s simple nomadic shelter in the middle of a desert; Bruce Chatwin’s one room with a hot plate in London; and, most beautiful of all, Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy’s 14th-century Islamic house, with its winding wooden staircase and orange trees growing indoors, a peaceful place above the dangerous uproar of Khan el-Kalili souk in Cairo.

These were all places that reflected their owners, not the things they owned.

Do you agree that books are the ultimate furnishings for a room? Click here to do our “What bookshelf are you?” quiz. When you’re done, snap a shelfie in your home and send it to us to stand the chance of winning a prize. 

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