Well, I did some work on the bookcase today (first project for adult ed
class). And I found out a couple of things along the way.

1) I had glued together boards for the pieces, but the pieces weren't flat.
Rather than taking a chance on sanding to take out the uneven board joins, I
decided to plane them even. Problem was that I only have a block plane. So
I used it to plane 3' boards. I was successful in evening up the boards.
But it wasn't easy pushing that block plane along the boards. I put lots of
gouges in the board faces that took a lot of sanding (and a few still
remain). Lesson learned (I think), use the right tool (longer bed plane - I
think).

2) For the first sanding, I tried 100 paper. It was taking forever to
smooth out some of the gouges I created with the block plane. So I went
down to 60, and found much greater success. So lesson learned here was to
not try to skip sanding steps.

Who knows what I'll discover next.