Posted byHow do you arrange your books in your home library? Haphazardly? Dewey Decimal System? Lately, I’ve been seeing more people on the interwebs arrange their books visually — not by type, but by color. In fact, there’s a whole Flickr group dedicated to The Rainbow of Books.
While there’s no denying that rainbow bookshelves are visually stunning, I can’t help but think it would be a major literary bummer if you couldn’t remember the spine color of a book when you wanted to find it.
Homies, what do you think? Is shelving your books by color the most gorgeous idea evar, or a book-nerd’s express train to irritation station?
I’d love to do this. Alphabatizing is HELL on dislexics. I can’t find a damn thing in libraries on my own. But, wifey has more books than me, and really wants to put them by subject/in serice order, so thats what we do. Then I just whine at her when I need a book and can’t find it. The worst is that frequently I can’t remember tha title either, so I just start describing it. Mostly by, you guessed it, color.
Her: “what book do you need?”
Me: “the purprle one with a pyramid on it”
Her: “…”
ah well.
Surely no-one has a collection of books with such perfectly coloured spines?! They have hardly any with mixed colours, but most of mine that I can think of really vary in colour. Also, I would hate for series to be separated. Currently mine are in author alphabeticalised, although before I had sorted them they went where they fitted and so it deviates from the current system if a too-tall one will not fit. I do like the look of this though, even if I don’t think it would ever work for me; the idea of it in a child’s room, on the other hand, is something I might try and remember.
I do keep threatening to arrange the boyfriend’s DVDs by colour, however, because with his system I can only find stuff by memory. He does it (entirely illogically to me!) by actors, not in alphabetical order but changing from one to another with films they are both in. Surely there are some actors dotted throughout though, and it is useless for anyone who has never searched through it before; maybe that is the point!
That sounds almost as confusing as my mums CD collection, which is in alphabetical order by whatever she thinks of first when looking for it.
So Robbie Williams is under R, but Infected Mushroom is in M and Iron Maiden’s Best of the Beast is in B. Some are even filed by what is on the cover!
To anyone but her it’s a jumbled mess but she insists it’s logical.
As my books are currently organised in no order whatsoever, i think i’m going to do this.
I did this about 5 years ago when my husband was away on a stag weekend – he thought I had gone a little bit mad when he returned.
It was time consuming to do it but it only lasted about 2 weeks, i found it so hard to find things, especially books you reference all the time like cookbooks. I found myself looking for a particular book, trying to figure out what colour spine it had and generally getting very frustated.
I only have one set of bookshelves about the size of the Ikea Billy bookcases so it’s not like I had a whole library of books
Good Luck to anyone who tries this.
This looks amazing, but would be a total nightmare for me. All of my books are organized by Author’s last name from first work to most recent.
I also feel like the spines of almost all of my books are either black, white, or orange or some combination of the three(judging by the quick glance at one of my bookshelves). This would make for a very boring rainbow.
I have to say, before I caught up with the whole “organising according to colour” thing, I NEVER organised my books (listens for the shocked gasps of horror). In all seriousness I struggle to be organised at all and because I am artistic, actually organising them in terms of colour keeps me organised because I want it to stay pretty! It means I put books back when I finished them!
I want to organize by color and honestly I usually look for a book by color anyway. Maybe when I have more books. right now the top shelf contains my favorites.
I’m an elementary school librarian, so the idea of shelving books by color makes me cry a little inside. We’re a little geeky around my home and we have our books cataloged MARC record style – they have their own call numbers and spine labels and our non-fiction even has their correct Dewey Decimal number. Now that I write that down, I realized I’m a little insane about my books…
Haha! I love it! I wish I had enough book shelf space to organize all of my books in any way! I just squish them all in the best I can and leave it at that.
i’ve been doing this for years. it’s really only a good idea if you’re very visual like i am. i’m much more likely to remember the spine color than the title.
Hmm… this made me look at my 3, tall beautiful bookshelves teeming with books which are vaguely organized by theme, but that’s about it… maybe I’ll try doing this within each theme, a rainbow on each shelf would look cool. I don’t think I could mix up ALL of my books though… that would be going too far. Also, I like the dustjacket idea… but sounds like too much work for me 🙂
In our last apartment, I separated my “read” books from the “unread” and put them on a case in a different room. The read books were put in color order since they were far fewer, whereas unread stayed alphabetical by author. At the end of the day though, I was still able to find books on the read case pretty easily, so I guess I have a better visual memory than I thought.
I don’t really reference my old books…I just keep them. I used to organize them by color when I had a nice big bookcase in our living room. Since buying a house (3.5 years ago) all of our books are still in bins in the attic. I should probably just donate them, because it’s painfully obvious that I’m not going to read them again!!
this is perfectly delightful. maybe just create a list of books via word document for reference when searching for a title.
Oh my, I’ve just entered heaven! <3
This makes my soul ache for an enormous, wall to wall bookcase. I have to make do with my books disorganised across several shelves and rooms … although I’m more of a category/author type. Cocktails/Baking/Art/(subcatergorised, ideally … painting, contemporary, classical, history, sculpture, New Zealand etc)Fiction (organised by author…perhaps alphabetically).
I don’t like it at all, aesthetically or organizationally. I actually like having all the different colors and heights mixed together, it’s a delightful hodgepodge. I also just kind of clump my books though – classics (includes Shakespeare, White Oleander, and Jane Austen), kids/teen lit, fantasy/scifi, things I read in English classes, essays, poetry, philosophy/history, feminism. That way I can look for the type of book I want and have all my options right there, more based on feel than necessarily subject.
I think it looks gorgeous (!) but would be totally ineffective when trying to find a book, plus as mentioned above, different books in series wouldn’t be together.
I do mine by genre, and then by size (size meaning either height or depth, whichever turns out looking better). So I have all my children’s books together, fantasy/sci-fi, comic books (I don’t have enough to warrant a longbox), nonfiction, art books, etc. It’s pretty easy to find whatever book I was looking for.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xstarsprinklesx/sets/72157624676807572/detail/
We have two Expedits full of books organized like this for about three years. LOVE IT. I don’t have a problem finding a book, usually.
Yes, I do have to move everything when I want to add a book, though.
This would be awesome in my personal library, where I would theoretically already know the books I have, and a general idea of where to find them.
I encountered this within the business section of Border’s recently. While I thought it was cute, it quickly turned into a pain when I realized I had no clue what the book I was looking for looked like, so had no clue where to look. When there are dozens of shelves to search through, this becomes a pain very quickly.
I was completely inspired by this and rearanged our entire house of books tonight. (except my huspands natural history shelf). Even though he admitted it looked amazing–he still wouldn’t give up his fabulous brightly colored science books. oh well 🙂
Alphabetising all the way, baby! While I can admit that it does look amazing, I’m a word nerd and I just really like to alphabetise things. Lists, addresses in mass emails (yes, really) anything with letters.
I like my books organised according to genre and then alphabetised within that genre, and while the varying heights and colours do sometimes bug me a little (we don’t have enough books or a nice enough bookcase to make it look cool) I much prefer that way to visual arrangements.
This fun video just popped up in my reader – It’s stop motion photography of organizing books by color – http://youtu.be/cFnuP9niRUg. Timely. 🙂
Tried it. Organizational nightmare. Whining and yelling because I can’t find that one book with that one scene that I really want to reread at 3am.
Also tried and loathed: organizing books by height.
I really love sorting things, so I’ve tried a bunch of different systems. The one that always works the best for me is fiction sorted alphabetically by author (and chronologically for each author), nonfiction sorted by narrative and non-narrative, with art books and poetry on their own.
All that said, a local artist reorganized an entire bookstore by color, and the results were pretty cool:
http://crystalking.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/thousands-and-thousands-of-color-coordinated-books/
I loooove the way it looks, but I have a lot of books and that number is growing everyday, so, I don’t know. The only way I can see it working for me is if I categorized it on the computer (“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, Second row, First shelf, Orange Grouping”).
Actually… that would work really well for me. Maybe I’ll do that when I move.