Courtney Barnes at Style Court did an entertaining series on magazine and tear sheet storage a while back. Yep, about six months ago. Or so I thought. It was actually a year and a half ago. Yes, a year and a half ago I read Courtney’s posts and thought, “I need to get on that.”

My magazines were stacked on shelves and as I pulled and replaced them they were all a jumble. The tear sheets are in horribly mismanaged files. Some are actually in folders by the subject that inspired the ripping, “Curtains,” “Product,” “Fabric” and the like. There is a broadly named and useless file brimming with treasure entitled, “Whole Rooms.” Another over-full and wobbly folder contains dozens of vintage features. Nonsense.

So I used a little of my Christmas money to buy lucite magazine holders from CB2 for the current magazines, which has left just the tear sheets to corral.

Thomas Britt covered many books on his Chinoiserie bookcases with cream-colored paper and gilt-edges stickers, but it was his engaging story of learning to marbleize paper as a teenager that has been bouncing around in my head for weeks.

Then I saw this. Stumbling upon things that have not caught your eye before is one of the advantages of poor organization. This charming shelf belonged (and may still belong) to Hitch Lyman, a garden designer and artist, who covered “treasured garden volumes with marbleized paper.” This image appeared in House Beautiful in February of 1998; the shelf may look the same today, though I have no way of knowing. Regardless, I don’t think I have seen anything as charming in months.But. I’m not a girl with a lot of time on my hands. I can’t go around willy-nilly covering books in my office. And yet. I do need binders. Binders to hold the tear sheets. In fact, I need several, which is why the lovely but somewhat pricey linen ones have never hit my shelves. Last week I picked up several of these cardboard binders and plan to cover the spines with wonderful paper.

I do. I plan to. Stay tuned.

For more information on marbleized paper, check Courtney’s posts here which includes a link to a post by Janet Blyberg on the same. Google turned up several how-to’s on marbleizing paper; Martha shows you how here.

Images of Tom Britt’s home via New York Social Diary, photography by Jeffery Hirsch. House Beautiful image by Richard Felber. Click on the image to see the books, and the “cat scratching post disguised as a chair,” bigger. It’s delightful. Top five paper images from Paper Mojo; bottom two from Paper Source.