How not to organize your books

My sister shared this story about her partner, who decided to organize his books into two boxes. He filled the first box with books he had already read. The second box was used for his TBR books. He labeled the first box "Read" and the second box "Read."

Hahahahaha! Love that.

That's fantastic!

...although highly improbable - who only has enough books to fill two boxes? :-D

I'd need like 100 boxes...LOL

I read a newspaper article a while back about decorating your house and they mentioned organizing one's books by COLOR so they would look nice on the shelves. Wow, great idea if you don't actually READ the books, but just have them for decoration, or care about how they are organized. They got some sarcastic letters from readers about that idea.

3> Although sis is a big reader, her partner is not. He probably could fit his books in two large boxes. Me, I have shelves lining my large bedroom and 6 boxes that used to hold office copy paper. I change the way I organize them regularly.

4> I once organized my favorite paperbacks by the color of the spine. I had one small bookcase that was a rainbow. It amused me at the time and I could always put my hand right on the book I wanted. Of course, that was pre-BookMooch.

I organise them by book size. Otherwise my ziggurats topple over.

... must get more shelves.

I gave up organizing my books long time ago. When I had a huge (almost wall-to-wall) custom-built bookcase installed, I have spent days organizing the books by subject/theme with the odd-sized ones (too big or too small) grouped together elsewhere in "islands" of books for decorative purposes. Guess what, no more than a year later I have newly acquired books tucked on top, sideway, double-parked, ... on all the shelves.
Today, my books are all over the house (at last count, I have more than 12 bookcases and about 25 boxes). Recording them in LT is a very slow undertaking and a disturbing process: should I or shouldn't I put a certain book back in the box, knowing that it belongs to a group/series on a certain shelf which is already full? Should keep me busy for a long time.

1 > Hilarious on the "read" and "read". I guess if you only have two boxes it works.

5 > That reminds me of how my husband (NOT that I'm implying he's a little OCD) keeps his colored markers arranged in a sleeve in ROYGBV order. If I ever wanted to mess with his head all I'd have to do is go in and switch a couple markers around. I've never actually done it yet, but I've toyed with the thought a time or two when I was a little irritated with him.

Like most of you, I have several bookcases filled with books, plus all the little piles lying around here and there. I'm not a fanatically organized person, but I do have a general system for keeping track of 1,000+ books that works for me, and I continually move them around. For instance, I have an entire bookcase that is TBR fiction; when I read one it moves to an "already read" fiction bookcase. New mooches go into the TBR bookcase when they arrive. I have similar systems for most of my nonfiction, except for my history books. I have about four shelves of those that are arranged roughly in chronological order according to event (Revolutionary war precedes Civil war which precedes WWII). Both unread and already read go into that, but they get read pretty quickly. That is why I'm able to entertain everyone with stories about Zachary Taylor and undelivered letters, LOL.

Great story by the OP, but I wish it wasn't true! So sad, and my first thought was "If he only needed two boxes, why organize in the first place?"

Sidenote: Darn that Mr. A! He's often a trouble-maker and now he's forced me to look up a word. So, do you have miniature buildings to hold your books?

Great story that can work almost only in English :)

PS: Does he have just 100 books or are his boxes with the size of a room?

>9 littleshell: Mr. Andrew, yes, I have noticed that. My children fear I will be found one day trapped under a collapsed wall of books -- the wall is now just a series of tipsy ziggurats in a row. (I lie: about three rows.) I haven't the time just yet to pile them "correctly."

I am considering walls, though, rather like the stone walls one finds separating fields in rural England, in which no one stone (book) rests on only one other and no mortar is used. Such an arrangement would be likely more stable, and even permit removing one book at a time until the whole becomes too, well, unstable. It might even be attractive, from the spine side, assuming one would build it spine out.

The books that have found homes on shelves, for me, are starting, bit by piece, to be arranged by Dewey Decimal number. That is, any one shelf is in Dewey order, and one bookcase is nearly there. I have given myself (and my about 3000 books) another half-decade to get arranged...

Yes, I give some away sometimes; some that have never been "cataloged" here. I am refining my criteria for keeping books, little by little, and fear I must become stricter!

5> My mom has a tiny book collection, too; books disappear from her room almost as soon as she's finished reading them. Me? I have books everywhere. I moved 6 months ago and still haven't gotten around to organizing them by anything other than where they fit.

>8 dadena: I have an entire bookcase that is TBR fiction; when I read one it moves to an "already read" fiction bookcase…

Noooo nono no, that would force me to confront how many books I have in my (euphemisticly named) TBR pile! LOL

11> That would be cool. Kind of like the game Jenga.

"Noooo nono no, that would force me to confront how many books I have in my (euphemisticly named) TBR pile! LOL"

Unless your TBR pile has 3,339 books in it (like mine does) or more, I don't want to hear about it. :)

I have had to limit my book collection to one bookcase...any more than that and my significant other will probably have a hissy fit.

I have two shelves for keepers and one that is a revolving collection of random scifi and fantasy novels that come and go via bookmooch.

I need a bigger house to have much more and still be able to keep the peace :(

Earlier this year I actually DID arrange my ~900 books by COLOR. It was beautiful! I was so certain that I knew my books and that I could find them without a problem. There were a few hiccups. A little hair pulling, nothing serious. But then, I started buying duplicate books. And that did it. I took all the books off the shelves and rearranged by genre. I don't regret it. After all, books do need to be moved and dusted and visited from time to time. And, believe it or not, you can make some interesting correlations when you file by color!

17> I bet that was really pretty Victoria! Did you take a picture?

I did take a few pictures before I disassembled them just to remember what it was like. But it didn't turn out very well for two reasons. 1) I cover my dust jackets in mylar and there was just too much shine and 2) I'm not a very accomplished photog and I couldn't compensate for that.

If only there was a way we could integrate this
http://webcat.hud.ac.uk/perl/colour.pl
with our LT catalogues (and use spine colours as well as cover colours) to find out books that way

Oh- that is kind of cool! :D

>16 Emidawg:
Restricting you to one bookcase? That might be grounds for divorce! I have 6 bookshelves in our little 2 bedroom condo. 2 are for read books, which works because they're piled and double stacked and I got rid of a lot lately, and the 4 in the living room are for TBR books. The TBR books are organized by genre, but the new ones I've gotten that don't fit are piled in no order whatsoever. Now that those piles are growing my husband is starting to grouse about too many books. I'm hoping for more bookshelves after we move in the summer.

Yeah I've arranged my books by color before and really enjoyed it, both because it looked cool and because it made for some interesting shelfmates. Of course the system fell apart because I'm bad at reshelving, but I'm actually thinking of doing it again- I figure the Christmas break is a good time for such projects...

I have shelves in the library that are adjustable. I've got them adjusted the way I want - some for paperbacks, some for trade paperbacks/hardcovers, some for oversize books. Shelves in the sunroom and parlour are not adjutable, but they work too because I can doublestack paperbacks, but fit trade paperbacks and hardcovers.

So I mostly organize my books by size. Mysteries live next to nonfiction live next to reference, live next to poetry, live next to ... you get it. Whatever shelf is needed for a book and there's room, there it goes. I also give each book a location code, so when I'm looking for all books by an author I can find them all, regardless of what room, what shelf, and what size they are. If I didn't have location codes, I'd go nuts. We're talking about 3,300 books here, and since I miss my mind, it's a necessity.

Adapted from organizing the disorganized child:

Visual organizers need to see books directly. They will have trouble finding anything not in plain view.
Spatial organizers need to have books close. They will have difficulty finding anything not within reach.
Chronological organizers want their shelves in some sort of order. The placement of books will make sense to them, and maybe only to them.

BTW, I have a like new copy of the above book that I will be happy to post for mooching if anyone is interested.

Edited because my stupid loaner computer from IT is garbage. I had to use my partner's comp to get the touchstone to work.

That book looks really interesting, VeraMarie! Could I possibly take it?

I think I'd cry if I had my books in order of colour. Instead, I have three/four bookcases. One is for fiction, one is non-fiction, and the other two are pressed together to make my children's section. Plus, I keep all of my Spanish-language and learning books on my desk. (Someday, I'd really like to take photos of them all and put them up on LT. Mmm, bookcase porn!)

26> You can get it here:
http://bookmooch.com/m/detail/0061797413

As I mentioned earlier, I regularly change the way I organize my books. I blame my ADD. Heh, it's as good an excuse as any.

I am so envious of those with walls of bookshelves. For now, I have room for only about 100 books and I have been doing well with that until I joined BM last month. Although I have sent out quite a few, already my TBR stack is growing out of control. We are going to remodel "soon" ( anytime in next 3 years, have been planning for 5), so I refuse to unload my many boxes only to have to rebox. My plan calls for many bookcases when remodel is complete. Bedroom, office, sparebedroom, backing to kitchen counter/room divider, living room, walk-in closet (I'd rather have books than shoes)........
Oh dear, house only 1300 sq. ft. The horses are all living outside fulltime now, maybe I can convert the barn to my Library. If it ever happens, I know I will spend endless hours organising and reorganising. One can dream.

I have five 6-foot tall bookcases in the living room and three big garage-style cabinets with doors and one more bookcase in my computer room. I have weeded out a lot of books in the last year but they are still full up. DH has been saying that I need to "thin the herd" but it's really, really hard. We have a tiny (1100 sq ft) house, and the books tend to take over. My books are arranged mostly by topic (crime, medical, sci-fi, Harry Potter, vampires/werewolves, and oddball authors like Shirley Jackson, Chuck Palahniuk and Roald Dahl are in one bookcase, for example) but also by theme, like Chick Lit or history. I couldn't do the color organizing thing since it would break up sets of books and make it hard to find anything. My DH reads very little, and finds it weird that I know where all my favorite books are located at any given time. (He has been trying to finish Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin for about 12 years now.) I change my bookcases around from time to time when I'm dusting them, but I tend to keep things arranged in a similar way.

I've gotten a lot tougher on myself lately as far as which books to keep. I'm glad I found BM so I can recycle the non-keepers to others who want them. It makes me feel better than just giving the books to Goodwill.

I had my books organized by color in my old bookshelf. My new entertainment system where I keep them has cubes, not rows (it's Ikea) so that wouldn't work quite as well.

I'm a college student who's not planning on staying in her current apartment for more than a year, so I was really apprehensive about buying/building bookshelves. Fortuitously, my windowsills are deep enough that they became my ad hoc bookshelves, although I'm a little concerned that the sunlight is yellowing the pages...and since I live in Chicago, the frost on the windows might get on the books...I'm sure I'll be mortified that I did this in a few years, but for now it suits me just fine.

(Plus, it means that no visitor to my apartment can escape my fabulous library!)

Well my Valentine's Day present was to get my office painted a deep pink. My curtains (valence) is black with a small pink rose. I was excited since the walls were a dirty beige. So I come home from work and 3 walls are painted (beautiful). I'm told that if I want the other wall painted (one of the long walls at that) I can move all the books from the floor to ceiling book shelves he built into the wall for me. There was no way in H he was going to do it himself. True love. LOL

On the bright side I guess it'll be a good opportunity to clean and dust the shelves.

4 > I don't do color, but height within genre. It bothers me if the books are not in descending height.

My books are split into three groupings: fiction (my books), non-fiction (also my books) and my husband's books, which are usually sci-fi or westerns. Stuff I won't let touch my Dickens and Tolstoy. It's really just organized snobbery.

I love when alphabetical order makes strange friends, Possession A Romance next to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, for example. What do they find to talk about?

Since my books have been accumulated slowly and haphazardly, I kind of like mis-matched sets.

> 35

RidgewayGirl -- you inspired me to look for "strange friends" on my own shelves.

My non-fiction is arranged in Dewey order (yeah, yeah, I know, I know...)

Juxtaposition:
Three Cups of Tea
is next to:
The CHUM Story
which is beside:
Cue the Elephant

for some reason, I find this amusing...

>#34: scifi and westerns would kick the a** of your Dickens and Tolstoy, that's why you have to keep them separated.

you know, "Stuff I won't let touch my Dickens" would make a great book title.

37- I dunno, man. Tolstoy was a Count. That's pretty bada**.

And he manned a cannon in Chechnya back in the day. Space pirates and Texas Rangers would run in fear at the sight of his massive beard.

Who would want to touch your Dickens P~

bwahahaha! oh man..

In an attempt to bring this slightly back on track... :)

My books are somewhat haphazard. Basically, I try to keep authors together but it's a war between how much space is free and how many books are in that pile. So it's not always sectioned off into genre. I have, for instance, a collection of books by/on the Kennedy's (USA) between Lurlene McDaniel (a children's author) and Kathy Reichs. I also have a copy of Hamlet beside my Susan Wiggs and A Streetcar Named Desire. Oh, and a history of the Irish race beside two children's books.

So my bookshelf is completly random, a bit strange, but organized in a way I can understand! :)

Edited because the cat decided to walk across the keyboard and click enter...

My books are totally unsorted other than seperating out the BM books which reside in the garage.

I don't have enough bookcases to sort books, so they go where I can make them fit. Someday I'll get new bookcases and organize them all.

I had things alphabetized, until I went through them for BM- now they are helter-skelter, and just sorted mainly into BM books (to be given away- these are in boxes), HC, PB, and my TBR pile (These are on Bookcases). And then there are the 3 boxes of books I am "saving" (mostly children's books) that are in my closet.

I hadn't been to LT in awhile and I started catching up on my reading. I have to say it feels good to be at home with fellow compulsive collectors :)

I have 5 bookcases with TBR - all sorted by alpha. I also have a couple of boxes containing a whole collection of one author and several boxes with series of books by an author. I have one large bookcase of inventory going out and several large bags of books I keep to take for trade ins. I also re-arrange them periodically. I have a large headboard that has shelves and little cubby holes for my really got to read asap books - my fear is soon they will topple down on me while sleeping......LOL