You might be using your bookshelf for other things besides books: a place to organize your eight-track tapes or the Mullet Cards from your Hockey Haircut Hall of Fame collection. But a lovely pair of hand-made bookends will display your books vertically so that you have to crane your neck and tilt your head to see the titles. Once you’ve made the basic bookends, you can customize them with flourishes that speak of your individuality, your creativity, your maniacal obsessions.
Since wood does not break in a straight line, you will need to cut some sticks into similar lengths. Then join the pieces together by gluing and clamping. First join two pieces for the base, and two more pieces for the uprights, creating four blocks of wood. Using more glue and a few screws, join two blocks at right angles to create each bookend. A quick pass with a table saw to trim all the edges straight would save lots of sanding time. No table saw? You can get nifty hand saws used for making mortice joints that cut nice and straight.
Now comes the creative part. You have a void to fill in that 90° space you created when making the book ends. In the parlance of artistes, this is “negative space.” Your mission is to fill it with some memento, as tacky as possible, and place it in a Feng Shui kind of way so it fits that L perfectly. Where to get your ideas? A zen approach would be to visualize a mountain pool with reflections of serenity, clouds, mist, but this is hockey! You need to visualize a broken-down trailer in the woods, buried half-tires painted a festive white surrounding a dried-up flower bed. The TV is on inside, the Leafs vs. the Frostbacks. A big bowl of fried pork rinds is on the coffee table, which is missing a leg. A faded print of dogs playing pokeris on the wall. The fridge holds nothing but beer. Are you there yet? Now look on top of the fridge. Is there some knickknack suitable for your bookend space? That’s exactly what you are looking for. If you are making bookends out of hockey sticks, chances are you have that perfect decoration right there in the room with you.
