How to: Design a bookshelf

Bookshelves are a tricky and deeply personal thing: There are those who only display first editions, others who clearly only took gender-studies courses in college, and oddballs who apparently haven’t read anything since The Da Vinci Code. But what to do when you’re attached to your crappy paperbacks? And how do you stretch a dearth of literature so it looks like you actually read?

Rayman Boozer, an interior designer whose well-curated shop Apartment 48 has been serving up everything from gorgeous batik curtains to fragrant hand soap for 13 years, argues that “a home should be comfortable—full of things that you love and use.” He holds true to this in his East Village apartment, which has sloping floors and no closets: “The things I display tell a story about who I am.”

One living-room wall—including the interior of a built-in bookshelf—is a lurid, but lovely, shade of green. “Painting a bookshelf the color of the wall, even if it’s not built into the space, hides imperfections like wires and warping—your eye only sees one thing.” Alternately, you can wallpaper the back wall of the unit, which makes it feel more considered as a space, and less like a slapdash storage unit. His shelves hold a variety of board games, like Sorry and Trivial Pursuit, intermingled with photography books, small framed artworks and souvenirs from Boozer’s travels. “I always bring back one thing for the shelves: something to remind me that I actually went.”

In the center of the living room, below eye level, Boozer houses his less photogenic travel guides and novels in a small three-shelf unit. Some books are stacked horizontally, others vertically, which “is a great way to extend a small collection and fill the space.” Always slightly off-center, Boozer stores mugs filled with colorful pens and markers on each shelf, along with a few tchotchkes (a wooden back massager, for one). “The colors of the pens integrate the randomness of the colors of the spines of the books,” he explains.

In his bedroom, which is painted a soothing brown, Boozer uses the built-in shelves along the back wall as a headboard. “I exercised restraint color-wise in here,” he explains, evident in the groupings of small white ceramic bud vases, oversize neutral-hued art books, brass figurines and black-and-white photographs of friends. “I can’t store anything away, so I use my bookshelves as a way of keeping things I care about close at hand.”