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 need to do this. I need more space. O.O This is gorgeous and looks like so much fun. 😀
I think it’s beautiful (I remember when that first picture was making the rounds at the start of the trend), but I have to say, unless you really are the type of person who remembers books by color better than by author/title, I feel like it screams “I don’t actually read any of these books on a regular basis!” because of how difficult it is to find anything. I did compromise, though, and organized my two tall CD racks by color because they’re all burned on my computer anyhow and I rarely use them. When I do pull out CDs for a long car trip, though, it’s a pain and a half to find specific ones, which is why I can’t imagine my 1,000+ book library being organized that way.
We have enough books that all of our shelves are stacked two deep – this would be wholly impractical. I use the two layers to place books I’ve already read in the back, and the ones waiting to be read in front.
Hubby’s favourite authors each get their own shelves in the living room, and he has a few shelves of singles in the bedroom. My fiction is organised by genre (historical, sci-fi/fantasy, teen lit), and by author’s national origin (Canadian/American/British/in English but from other parts of the world/in translation). My favourite authors are separated out and have their own special shelves.
Within each genre, I like to have a flow going along it – a continuum, say, from hard SF to fantasy.
There are some strategically placed large hard-covers that are actually holding up the shelves themselves, so my system has to start with them.
Every time I move my librarian-esque anal retentive best friend takes great pleasure in organizing my books by genre and then alpha by author. I can’t stand this, but it’s sort of her reward for helping me move. My reward for dealing with my bossy BFF is the glee I get when I pull all of the books off of the shelf and place them haphazardly (we’re talking upside down, sideways, paperbacks between larger volumes etc) , in a variety of eye pleasing manners and often ad knick knacks and things from my travels that are not books and take books that are favorites or have cool covers and leave them laying around my house. I actually ended up putting a piece of glass on top of a giant stack of coffee table books to make an end table and this thing makes her completely crazy, but it gives me such pleasure to see and smell all of my books. Plus I get to wander across them accidentally and pick them up randomly and fall in love all over again!
My books are randomly shoved where ever I happened to find space for them. They are sort of arranged by size, since I have shelves with different heights. I rarely want to read something specific and when I do I remember about where it should be.
And I’m a librarian : ) I work in an organized environment so I don’t want my collection to be.
I do both! My fiction is alphabetical by author, so I can find what I’m looking for. My non-fiction is by colour. I never know who the author/publisher of my non-fiction is, and rarely even know the exact title. But I DO know whether I’m looking for that big red home-reno-DIY book, or that little purple dream dictionary.
We threw a party in the spring, and some of my friends thought it would be great fun to ‘mess up my rainbow’… I think they were looking for a bigger reaction than they got. They were pretty sure I had done it because of some sort of anal-retentive-OCD thing. In reality, I just did it because I thought it would look pretty.
I’m an alphabetizer…But lately I’ve been covering my battered S.F. paperback series in colored paper (art paper if I have it, old calendar pages or maps if I don’t). Since I stick to the same paper for the volumes in each series, I’m getting the best of both worlds!
Seeing as I currently don’t organize my books by anything at all, this would be an okay way for meee.