Friday open thread: organising your bookshelves

[dolorosa_12]

Today's Friday open thread brings you a prompt from dhampyresa that resonates deeply with my librarian heart: How do you arrange your books/comics/etc in your home?



It will surprise none of you to know that I arrange my books thematically (according to an idiosynchratic personal idea of what constitutes a common theme: a theme could be 'super formative childhood books that I always reread,' or it could be 'autobiographical nonfiction'), and within each of those themes I arrange the books alphabetically by author surname. I have been doing this since I was a small child, although it was a lot easier to do when I lived in Australia, where my bookshelves were a) a lot more uniform in terms of shelf height, and b) not shared with Matthias.

Our current bookshelves are a mishmash of secondhand items donated to us by various friends and relatives when they were either leaving Cambridge, or trying to get rid of clutter, and as a result that are all manner of shapes and sizes. Some have very low shelves, so my taller books couldn't be stored there. Matthias and I for the most part keep our books separate — sometimes they're on the same bookcase, but never on the same shelf. This is handy, because he has a completely different organisational system!

If we ever move, I want our respective sets of books to be more clearly separated, because I much prefer my organisational scheme. I also live in hope that we'll end up somewhere with many more built-in bookshelves, so that I can finally get my six cases of books shipped from Australia, where they've been sitting in my mum's flat since 2008.


How do you organise your reading material? (Bear in mind, if you say 'by colour', I may have to flee to the hills in horror. /joke)

Comments

[luzula]

I've got a bit less than four bookcases. Some areas are separated out by subject, such as my three shelves of books on taxonomy/species recognition. And now I've got a shelf dedicated to my current fannish interest! But otherwise I really have no organizing principle except historical accretion and size, that is, within a shelf books will be sorted by height.

[dolorosa_12]

It sounds as if your system is pretty similar to mine, particularly the need to arrange things according to size, with bookshelves whose height cannot be adjusted.

[corvidology]

As I can never say we have too many books I will have to say we have too few bookshelves and no where to put any more... it's part of the reason why we want a bigger house. :D

So, the honest answer to your question is anywhere they'll fit.

[dolorosa_12]

Haha, I bet this is a pretty common problem! I actually just asked the same question on Twitter, and a lot of the replies were similar to yours. Bookshelves aren't infinite, and eventually storage gets a bit haphazard, no matter how good our intentions are in planning the perfect organisational system.

[forestofglory]

I currently have two sections: Fiction and Non-fiction and with in each section the books are alphabetical by author surname. (I can never decide on thematic sections small than that -- too many books are in between)

All most all my shelves and IKEA billys. I have three tall ones and one short one. I also have another small shelf that's a hand me down that's currently holding my physical TBR.

I did a purge earlier this year so they aren't full at the moment. I've been rereading a lot less lately so its less important to for me to keep books. i went through and asked myself which books where my friends, and then I kept all the friend and got rid of the rest.

[dolorosa_12]

I like the sound of your system: clear, without too many rules, and flexible enough to easily add any newly acquired books without much reorganisation.

IKEA billy bookshelves seem to be the most common, particularly among people of our age. Given all our bookshelves are secondhand ones we've inherited from various Cambridge friends leaving student/rental accommodation, I'm a bit surprised we don't have any ourselves!

I'm impressed at your book-purging — I know from experience how hard it is to get rid of them.

[forestofglory]

Yeah, the ease of shelving new books is definitely a plus. I do generally remember author names so I can find things, which is always important for a personal library.

Sometimes I deal with anxiety by cleaning stuff -- the book purge was one of those. Also I'd been spending time thinking "why do I have all these books? I don't reread much" but also "who am I if not a person who owns lots of books?"

Now I know I'm a person who owns many books because they feel friendly and safe to be around

[nerakrose]

currently they are just piled up on my desk or on a single shelf with no eye for organisation, because I don't have that many books with me atm, and all the ones that are in boxes at mum's house were fit into those boxes based on size and weight.

what I used to do is I had shelves from IKEA with adjustable shelf heights, so I could store all my comic books and Very Large hardbacks on the bottom shelves. on the next one up I stored trade paperbacks (airport edition size). the shelves above those were either arranged to accommodate b-format paperbacks or c-format paperbacks (pocket/mass market). I had a separate bookshelf against another wall that held all regular sized hardbacks. all individual size sections were organised alphabetically save for the comics, which I organised by publisher (marvel, DC, Image, etc.) and then by number or chronological sequence.
I had to organise by size in order to maximise space - if I had it all alphabetically, I would've had a lot of dead space having pocket paperbacks next to hardbacks, when you can have three shelves of pocketbooks in the same space you can have two shelves for b-format paperbacks, or one and a half for hardbacks. If I ever manage to find somewhere more permanent to live (and work) and will be able to get all my stuff back from mum's house, I'll likely go back to using that kind of system again.

(textbooks and the like from university were kept in the shelves in my desk as I didn't have that many (I used the library copies rather than buying my own, most of the time) and I wanted to keep them separate from all my fiction. I don't have a lot of non-fiction and what little I have was kept in the desk as well.)

[dolorosa_12]

Your former system makes me so happy: such perfect organisation, so perfectly designed to suit a library made up of so many diverse types of books.

I feel your pain regarding the need for a bigger/more permanent living space holding you back from sorting out your book collection. I've been living in the UK for twelve years, and in this current house for eight years, and yet the majority of my books are still sitting in my mum's flat in Sydney, because there just isn't the space to store them here. British houses, particularly relatively new ones, just don't have enough storage space.

I hope you're able to move somewhere more permanent soon, and can at least get things out of piles and/or boxes!

[nerakrose]

I managed to find photos -

this is right after I got those shelves and I'd just filled them. The shelves are actually bathroom cabinets (hence the glass shelves - you can fit other types of shelves in, but they would've been too thick to accommodate the books in that case) and you can fit doors in them and all. I wanted these because they're shallower than regular bookcases and my flat was just tiny enough that I didn't want all that useless dead space at the back of the bookcase, plus I could stack them like this and have a semi-wall of books.

this one is from some years later, with more books in :D (I...never got around to hanging those posters on the wall, lmao.)

I actually tried to sort my books by colour once because I wanted to see what it'd look like, but quickly realised I didn't have an even enough spread of colours for it to look good. (also, space issues.) I'm a very visual person so usually identify my books not by alphabetical sorting, but by cover, so that wouldn't have been an issue for me. I once ended up with four copies of the same book all with different covers because I couldn't remember if already had the book and the cover I was looking at was unfamiliar....so yeah, four copies of the same book. 😂

[monksandbones]

I have a lot of books, and while the libraries have been closed due to COVID they've proliferated so much that I'm about to buy another bookcase to hold them all!

I keep most of my books, roughly speaking all my academic books, plus literary fiction, organized according to their Library of Congress numbers (plus a few that I've given new, better LOC numbers to because I didn't agree with or couldn't find their original ones). I have a spreadsheet to keep them all in order, and re-sort it alphabetically each time I add new books to it.

I do have a few separate sections, however. My cookbooks have two shelves of their own, where they're arranged by size and then alphabetically, and I have two shelves of oversized books and museum catalogues, which are in their own LOC sequence. Academic journals have a shelf of their own (my issues of Speculum are one of the reasons I need another bookcase). I also have a small reference/dictionary section, a small bookcase containing my mystery collection, arranged alphabetically, and another small bookcase containing the selections from my childhood book collection that aren't still in my parents' basement. Plus, I have a little shelf with books for my niece Clara when she visits!

[lirazel]

I love people who actually implement real classification systems into their home libraries. It's so charming to me.

[dolorosa_12]

The fact that you sort your books by Library of Congress subject headings fills me with delight — likewise your spreadsheet. I should do something similar, although my preference would probably be a library in Endnote referencing software, so that Endnote can populate all the fields for me rather than requiring me to type all the details of the book into a spreadsheet by hand.

In general, your entire set up seems like the ideal, at least from my perspective as a librarian! It's clear you've put a lot of thought into it.

[lirazel]

I do just like you do: thematically (and again, like you, with various categories that make sense only to me), then by author.

My sister has all her children's books by color and I actually love the way it looks!

[dolorosa_12]

I wonder if there's some correlation between sorting things in the way we do, and being librarians?

I can see why a library of children's books sorted by colour would work — the only other real way to sort picture books would be by size and author, and given the visual nature of children's books, it makes sense to make use of that when organising them.

[lirazel]

I think there is definitely a certain kind of personality that goes into librarianship because they enjoy (or at least are interested in) information organization, so probably!

[laurenthemself]

By genre, with ANZ spec fic on one big bookshelf at one end separate from everything else, and separate from that again is the Authors I Know bookshelf, which at this point is 90% overlap with the ANZ spec fic shelf anyway.

I have SFF, horror, queer stuff (combines fiction and not fiction), children's and YA, poetry, plays, crime fiction, humour, paranormal fiction, women's fiction (fka 'chick-lit'), and kind of a general fiction/litfic area, and in the living room there's RPGs and comics and TV/media tie-ins. Then there's textbooks. And then in my room I have writing reference books/dictionaries, all my Red Dwarf tie-in stuff, and pagan books.

Within those categories, if it can be feasibly sorted by author surname alphabetically, then title alphabetically unless overridden by chronological series, then it is. The textbooks are sorted by subject, the RPGs are sorted by system, and the comics are all trades or print collections of webcomics so they're sort of more by what fits where on the shelves.

If I ever sort my reading material by colour you have my permission to abandon me in the hills.

[dolorosa_12]

Your system sounds perfect, and just reading your description of it is extremely soothing. I love things being neatly categorised and sorted into their specific places — I suspect this is in part why I ended up becoming a librarian — and I especially like this when the organisational scheme is specific to the individual who set it up.

the Authors I Know bookshelf, which at this point is 90% overlap with the ANZ spec fic shelf anyway

Aww, that's lovely! The ANZ spec fic community has always seemed lovely to me, and it's a regret of mine that I left the country before I was interested in participating in that community (other than ... being part of an Isobelle Carmody forum that she also engaged with).

If I ever sort my reading material by colour you have my permission to abandon me in the hills.

I should try to stop being so outraged when people do this — after all, an organisational scheme just needs to be meaningful to the person or people who use it — but it just makes my brain hurt! How do people find anything if their books are sorted by colour?

[torachan]

When I used to keep books after reading them, I arranged things alpha by author. Those were also the days when book sizes were much more standardized and you had hardbacks in one size and paperbacks in another. Now it seems like every publisher has a different random size for both, so I would probably have to come up with some sort of system that took that into account.

But as it is, the only books I have are ones I haven't read yet, and that's just one small shelf, so it's divided between fiction and non-fiction, with the non-fiction loosely arranged by subject, but otherwise not much organization, as I don't keep the books once they're read and don't really feel the need for a long term solution.

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, I'm very impressed that you've got to the point of only hanging onto books you're currently reading! I reread so often that this would be impossible (indeed, I make my decisions whether to buy a physical book, or buy an ebook/borrow it from the library solely on the basis of whether I feel I'm likely to want to read it again, so my collection of print books essentially consists of books I have/will reread).

[torachan]

I used to reread all the time when I was younger but I just don't have the time for it now. I do reread occasionally but it's rare enough that I can just get the book from the library again or whatever when I do. There's just too many books out there that I want to read!