I've spent most of the week posting photos of various fans' bookshelves, so I guess it's only fitting that I wrap things up on that front with some photos of my own collection. I had lots of built-in shelves installed when I was building my house about a decade ago, and there are a number of different zones. Let's start with...

The zone for Darren Shan books! This is the most complete collection of Shan editions in the world, as one would expect. My agent surely has the second most complete collection, but I tracked down various bits and pieces that I'm fairly certain you won't find in his, such as some of the illegal Iranian editions of my books, plus some Darren Shan fan manga which were (again, illegally) published when Shan-mania was at its height in Japan in the early noughties. I have a matching set of shelves on the opposite wall to this one, but those are for the overflow spare sets -- I have 2 or 3 copies of most of my books, just to be on the safe side.

Zone 2 is my general book collection, hardbacks and paperbacks of different sizes. I've read a lot of them, though others are still on the TBR pile -- I suspect quite a few of them will remain on that pile to my dying days, as I bought some of these when I was a teenager at school, and in university. Indeed, there are a few dating back to my pre-teen years. I doubt if any of these books are of any monetary value, but to me they're priceless.

Zone 3 is where I store my comics and manga (lots of both of those) as well as my "special" books. (I've also included a close-up shot of that section.) These include first editions, signed copies, as well as books that others have signed and dedicated to me. (I don't think it's visible in the photo, but there's a copy of a Harry Potter book with a very nice message that J K Rowling wrote to thank me for sending her a copy of Cirque Du Freak.) Some of these ARE worth quite a lot of money, but I don't collect with an eye on that -- these are all books that I either loved in the past, am looking forward to reading in the future, or which have been gifted to me. I have a sentimental attachment to them all. For me, reading is all about the sentiments.

These days I read most books on my Kindle, as it's much more convenient, but as you'll see from these photos, I totally get it when readers sneer at electronic reading devices and say that ebooks can never match the wonders of "real" books. On a sentimental level, they never will. The story is always what matters most to me, and on that level I don't care if I read a book on paper, a screen, or papyrus. But having a collection like this which you can view and interact with, which stirs up memories long forgotten, both happy and sad... yeah, that runs the story a fairly close second.

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My Archibald Lox books only exist as eBooks at the moment. There WILL be physical editions at some point, to add to my shelves, but for now we collectors will have to wait on that front. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you must have missed the May issue of the Shanville Monthly -- click on the following link to rectify that situation ASAP! :-) https://www.darrenshan.com/news/shanville-monthly/