The Canada shelf is at hand height when I sit in this particular chair. Had the chair been a bit lower I would have grabbed Cutting Up In The Kitchen: The Butcher's Guide To Saving Money On Meat & Poultry by Merle Ellis instead. The shelf above that would have yielded either a small, old-smelling book on the island of Hokkaido, my copy of Unmentionable Cuisine, or Ethnic Canadians, Vol. 8: Culture and Education, by Martin L. Kovacs. It's just that at this height, the other book was the very first one under my fingers.