Book pile bonanza winners

We had an amazing amount of fantastically great entries for the 10 million books / valentines / presidents book pile contest. That's a lot of superlatives, I know, but trust me, it's worth it. There were Valentine's Day themed piles, President's Day themed piles, and a whole bunch of people took us up on the "best damn book pile ever". (See the entries here, under the Flickr tag "LibraryThing10mil").

Several themes emerged, and not just Valentines and Presidents. We had several variations on a heart, showing love from Harlequin to Latin. There was fun with numbers and words, sweet stories, and a surprising number of floating shelves (I'm covetous). Overall, a fantastic collection of book piles. You can see them all here (and several that hadn't posted to Flickr yet are linked to in these blog comments).

Without further ado, our grand prize winner. madinkbeard's "We heart LibraryThing" was a stand-out. As an added bonus, you can see all 86 books that were used to create this red spine-d heart here. Madinkbeard will be getting one hundred dollars—to be spent entirely on one book.


We also have five runners up, who will each get a year's gift membership to LibraryThing.*

Runner up. First, I loved parelle's "Bookpiles and my love life", which chronicles a relationship, from a bookstore meeting. The story starts here and is continued here.




Runner up. "Presidents", this wall of presidents by Pesky Library was beautiful, and, I think, entered by a small library?


Runner up. jadelennox's "Ten million books and counting" was one of our number themed entries—starting low and going up high. From zero to pi to infinity (and beyond?)!

Runner up. "Books are love!" by j2.0 brings book piling to a whole new level (and also gives us our first nude photo blog post)!


Runner up. And lastly, "Never Enough Time for Reading", by Munzerr solves the all important question of having a "good body:books ratio" (as mentioned in the photo's comments).



There are a couple of other photos that we'd like to highlight (let's call them the the honorable mentions, for lack of a better term).

Honorable mention. Narrisch's "Babel in Translation" was fantastic (and extra points for using the phrase "book-a-ganza").


Honorable mention. skullfaced's Skull stacking managed to combine natural history with Valentine' s Day and Darwin's Birthday, and all on a bathroom floor!

Honorable mention. Kristy's "Pursuit of Love Bookpile" I had picked as a winner, until I realized that she was John's girlfriend, and that that probably meant she couldn't win an actual prize.**


Honorable mention. Lastly, we had a soft spot for the books in the truck, nicely packed into their "car seats".


*Will the winners please email me (abby@librarything.com) so I can send the prizes your way?
**Even though we never explicitly stated it, I think that wives, girlfriends, and children of LT employees, though welcome to submit photos, can't actually win. Hey, we can make up rules as we go along, can't we?

UPDATE For some reason, one of these photos that previously contained books now is showing up as a chicken salad (I think. The vegetarian in me isn't quite sure). In the meantime, Flickr's down page reports that they're having a massage (I'm jealous).
UPDATE part deux Apparently Flickr is having a cache problem, leading to "weirdness" (a technical term). So you might see chicken salad, you might see a book pile. Enjoy either way.