I decided to start Shelfie because I like to look at photos of other people’s shelves full of RPG books.
The inspiration for it came from Workspaces, a newsletter about the home office setups of different software developers, designers, etc. And from the hundreds of shelfies I already enjoyed looking at on different Discord servers, Reddit, etc.
Now, I’m not a complete idiot. I understand that these kinds of newsletters are consumerist projects putting a lot of emphasis on a part of the hobby that might be its most boring and over-represented—the products—when one of the beautiful things about RPGs is that you can actually play them pretty well without ever spending anything. (At least in terms of money; you might end up spending a lot of time.)
So I hesitated to start this newsletter. Quite a bit, actually. But ultimately, I decided that you can do worse things than highlight books by people who, on average, will have created them out of love for the medium. I’ll also try my best to not make it about the size of the collections shown, but to instead focus as much on the person owning the collection as on the collection itself.
If that’s not enough for you to not hate this whole project, I sympathise—I too am an avid hater of my own projects. But what can I say? I really like to look at photos of other people’s shelves full of RPG books.