As you can probably see from this picture, I’m still in the process of cleaning up some of the mess I made on Saturday while reorganizing approximately 1,000 books that are shelved in my home office. But overall, especially now that my knees are feeling a bit better after two days of resting them, I am pretty pleased with the result. I can’t believe how much easier it is now to find any specific book that I might be searching for than it was before I moved almost every single book shown here to a new spot on the shelves.
I still have some fine-tuning to do with the few books still on the floor, but I have also marked about 30 books to be given to friends in a few days and discovered more than a few hidden gems I’d forgotten all about.
Prior to this re-do, my books were mostly sorted alphabetically according to author surname. I also had that center section dedicated to older editions, classic literature, and all those Library of America books in the center of the middle section, along with another couple of shelves for signed copies and other more valuable first edition copies of some of my favorite books. But the main problem was that many of my favorite writers didn’t limit themselves to novels. They also wrote short stories, novellas, essays, memoirs, literary criticism, and the like – genres that seemed to disappear into some kind of black hole when I went looking for a specific type of reading experience.
So I decided to chuck the surname method in favor of dedicating separate sections of the shelves to:
- Short Stories
- Memoirs, Essays, and Criticism
- Westerns
- Biographies
- Historical Fiction
- Road Trips and Long Walks
- History
- Science Fiction
- Signed Copies / More Valuable Editions
- Favorite Series
- Spy Fiction
- LOA Books, Modern American Books, and Other Favorite Editions of “Literature”
Within these genres, the books are still sorted by author surname or, in the case of biographies, by surname of the subject of the biography.
This is what it looked like as I first began to shift the shelves into standalone stacks while I tried to do some shelf-cleaning at the same time. All was going well until a couple of hours later when one of the stacks tilted over into another stack and the domino-effect resulted in books all over the floor in one big heap – to be resorted all over again.
I still have another wall and some smaller bookshelves in other rooms to sort through, so this is still very much a work-in-progress, but I’m already happy with the results. I’m particularly excited to find that I have so many short story collections, for instance. Until I saw all of them in one section, I never realized how many stories I still haven’t explored or even sampled. Even a substantial portion of the LOA books are short story compilations, but those are going to be kept with the other LOA books. I think this effort is going to impact my TBR list for years to come because I only realize now what a goldmine I’ve been sitting next to for all these years. (I’ve also culled some junk from the shelves – books that are going to be donated.)
How do you guys organize your own shelves? Traditionally, randomly, by genre – or by some combination of all of this? I’d love to hear if you have something better that works for you.
