Are these big beautiful books beautiful enough for your shelf?

Late last year, while my home's kitchen was being renovated, I helped my mother reorganise the kitchen cupboards. Her intent was simple: we had too much stuff, and while we now had a lot of room to put them in, she wanted to bring our dinnerware down to the essentials. Despite that intent, she would regularly point to a stack of beautiful porcelain plates and go, "What do you think? Should we keep these?"

And my answer was almost always, "no." They were wonderful plates, but I didn't care for them. In a two-person household that barely invited guests, we didn't need every single one of them. I insisted we pare down to at least half of them.

What I found at first annoying — but later quite touching and inspiring — was how often her choice to keep the ones that remained was that, more than the ones she disposed of, they were most of all too beautiful to let go of. At one point, she even put one gold-trimmed set of dessert plates back inside the topmost cupboard mere moments after taking them out and said, “These are for me”.

So let me ask you in turn: what do you have on your bookshelf that is just for you? How much space does it even have? At this very moment, you can probably accept a few more thick hardcovers—how many? Two? Three? Can your bookshelf make a forward investment in seven tabletop tomes? Can you slip a pad of character sheets in there? Can your dice bag fit another full set of artisanal polyhedrals that came with them? 

Okay, what about space for a large cube with a severed hand in it?