Let’s not have any more fights about rainbows, okay? I know. I know that if you are a person who believes deeply in the power of the alphabet, the books-by-color thing makes your fingers twitch. I have been that person. I have hated on books-as-decor-objects, I have screeched at the idea of all-the-books-spines-in, I have shaken my judgmental little head at the rainbows flooding bookstagram, no matter that I’ll practically jump out of a moving car to see a rainbow anywhere else.
But I have also come around to the fact that every one of these choices is valid. And so are all the other possible options, too.
When did you start to care how your books were arranged on their shelves? When did it matter? This desire can’t possibly set in at a truly young age. Picture books and early readers—and I say this as someone who has cursed her way through shelving them in the kids’ section of a bookstore—resist organization. They simply do not want to be sorted or filed; you’re lucky if you can even read the author’s name on the teeny little spine. They want to be shoved in willy-nilly, wherever they will fit, wherever they will stay upright. Or not. Upright, as it turns out, is overrated sometimes. (Stacking your books horizontally so that more will fit on the shelf is a perfectly respectable way to use space.)
I have admitted before that I tried to make up my own library labeling system as a child, a little pretend Dewey decimal system that made no sense, involved no categories, and may not have even been alphabetical. It was an art, not a science, like all personal book systems. But even then I wanted some form of organization, some way to decide where to put the Beverly Cleary and Lloyd Alexander and Ruth Chew and Katherine Paterson books that were my mainstays before I discovered my mom’s fantasy shelves.
Those shelves were tall, half out of reach, and incomprehensible. Authors went together, I think. The Jo Claytons were side by side until I started pinching them, at least. That has always mattered to me: authors, series, like shelves with like. But it only mattered in that I liked to look at my mom’s books and see how much of an author’s work I’d read. (The C.J. Cherryh shelf was daunting.)
But the books I’ve read as an adult have been in order for a long time. By “in order” I mean alphabetical by author (and chronological within series), not sorted by genre, with only broad categorical sorting. Comics can’t go with novels; the sizes are all wrong. YA books have their own space, as do mass markets.
We alphabetical types can be tyrants. Part of it is simply that if you have a certain kind of brain, alphabetizing books is soothing. Organizing them within the basic, straightforward, easily graspable concept of the alphabet is a way to make order—one kind of order—out of the chaos of a mountain of books (which is to say, out of a small part of life in all its chaos). It’s satisfying. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve offered to organize friends’ shelves for them.
But there is also a reality that few alphabet-lovers want to admit: Organizing books alphabetically is its own kind of chaos. It’s subjecting your beloved stories to an arbitrary system that puts books next to each other when those books have absolutely nothing in common other than that they are made up of printed pages that were once thoughts in a writer’s brain. What is Nalo Hopkinson doing next to Nick Hornby? (I kind of like Tamsyn Muir next to Haruki Murakami, though.) This may be even more random in my nonfiction, where Felicia Day and Joan Didion are side by side.
Once you truly accept the fictional chaos wrought by the alphabet, it’s hard to take a forceful stance against any other organizing principle. Books designed with the same color jackets are more likely to have things—themes, moods, genres—in common than books shoved together by their authors’ last names. Retellings? Coming of age stories? Books you read in college? Why not put them in clusters? Why not put a book by another book that it feels like, shelve Angela Carter where she can argue with the Grimms, leave Lev Grossman buddied up to C.S. Lewis, or put every book you read in middle school into its own shelf? (I keep being tempted to reshelve my books in the order in which I read them—a High Fidelity-esque notion that would probably end in tears and a large glass of whiskey.)
Your books are your books, and you get to decide what to do with them. So why are we so horrified when other people don’t use our systems? BuzzFeed once lost its mind over people shelving their books spine-in. “Why do people on the internet care so much about how other people organize their books?” Literary Hub asked.
There’s a different answer for every specific outburst of shelf rage, but at the heart of it, I think, is something simple and personal and sometimes hard to say: because people care so much about their books, and because we can be really bad at remembering that another person’s choices have nothing to do with our own. Some of us are more sentimental than others; some identify more with fictional characters than others; some don’t know how to explain exactly how it is that sometimes a book slips under our skin and seeps into our bones, but some books do just that. They aren’t just objects. They’re one more thing—like an unforgettable experience, or a person you love—that adds up to you becoming you.
And at the same time, they’re mass-produced items that you can do whatever you like with.
Rainbow books, books by size, books with spines in, books that are all leather-bound and ostentatious—they can all seem like the outcome of viewing books as objects rather than stories, of valuing them for their outsides rather than their insides. We’re not supposed to do that, right? We’re not supposed to judge books—or people—by their covers. And if you’re the kind of person that grew up hiding out in the library because your own cover wasn’t right, for whatever reason—if you’re one of those, like I was, it can be hard to even want to look at books as aesthetic objects.
Books, though, aren’t people. They’re designed, inside and out. They’re containers for stories, not the stories themselves. And you can’t know just from looking at someone’s shelves whether they’ve read and loved every book or even one of them, no matter how they’re arranged. You can only know that something about that book—the object or the story—spoke to them in a way that made them want to keep it.
If I could transform into any kind of book organizing person, it wouldn’t be a rainbow or an artful stack person. It would be a books-all-over-the-house person. Little shelves here and there, piled with well-loved books and knick-knacks. A wall of shelves, maybe, but also books in every room, books wherever they fit, books on interesting bookcases and books leaned up against the wall like a coffee table.
I just can’t do it. They have to stay together. At the very least the sections have to stay together, and the unread books in their own space. When my partner and I moved last year, we bought new book storage: little modular boxes (that also, at least in theory, allow us to move the books without packing them). We covered a wall with them, thrilled to finally have A Book Wall. Optimistically, I thought it would have plenty of space for the books we have and the books we’d get. Maybe room for a plant, even.
It’s already crowded, books slipped in across the tops of others, some shelves simply refusing to hold any more. And what’s more, we’re already thinking about changing it up.
Books are objects. They’re paper and glue and covers and ink. They’re also stories. An ebook isn’t any less valid because it can’t be placed on your shelf when you’re done with it. And a bookshelf that makes no sense to you—whether organized by rainbow or theme or personal chaos or timeline or “this one made me cry” or chronology or, heck, astrology or the fantastical beasts it contains—is just as valid as your own. It’s a shelf full of books. It’s good no matter what you do with it.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
I organized my books waaaaaay back when I only had a few hundred because even then, dozens of concussions ago, I couldn’t remember what I owned and what I’d only read. I am very happy I began back then, when sorting was a minor issue, and not now. Now, of course, if I misfile something it can be years before I find it again.
Once I had my library in order, patterns jumped out. Like, apparently I enjoyed James White, judging by the number of books I had by him.
Cool post! I’m a subject-then-alphabetical-by-author shelver, with most of the hardback books on the bottom two shelves and the paperbacks above. The books that are in double-shelved books and at the back, as well as the cookbooks, are the exception (no organization at all) and there is one shelf that holds books I’d grab if I suddenly had to leave the house–those include Tolkien’s Letters, Lewis’ Surprised By Joy, classic lit, YA, baseball history, graphic design, and cultural theory.
I’m a books-in-more-than-one-room shelver too as there are books in most of the shelves either side of the hearth, tho’ not as organized as the books on the office shelves, and cookbooks on top of the breadbox (either I’m using ’em at the time or cook from ’em often and just leave ’em there).
If I’m reading a book that has a book jacket, I’ll remove it and leave it on top of the books ’til it’s time for re-jacketing and re-shelving. What about a whole post about book jackets (unless there has been one and I’ve missed it)? And books that are illustrated?
I destroyed two book cases by shelving my UofArizona planetary science texts on the top shelf. Thought the first time was a fluke. Nope.
The rainbow thing FILLS ME WITH RAGE. Which is absurd, because, as you say here, these are all personal choices that don’t hurt anyone. The human mind is a mystery!
My organizational system (honestly even using the term “organization” about what I do to books is probably some level of moral failing): biggest bookcase houses Fiction, alpha by author’s last name/chronological by pub date, but any biographies or memoirs of the authors are also sorted into this section after their work. Second largest bookcase: anthologies, lit mags, lit criticism, books by friends, books I’m planning to read for TBR Stack. Small bookcase #1: unsorted spillover fiction (i.e. I unpacked it after the main Fic case was full), NonFic, YA, comics. Small bookcase #2: RELIGION, also unsorted. Small bookcase #3: film criticism, gender stuff, cookbooks. (I should mention that all of my bookcases are double-stuffed.) And then there are like 4 knee-high stacks on the floor of whatever won’t fit everywhere else. But I know where everything is! Mostly. Oh and one extra bookcase for all the books that are too big to fit on the other shelves, unsorted.
I shelve alphabetically by genre and by size. All of the mass market F&SF that I read regularly are on two shelves, with Trade and Hardcovers on the shelves underneath, and graphic novels, non-fiction, and misc hardcovers on the bottom. I have a two-shelf case at the foot of my bed with the Wall of TBR on top, and favorite series shelved in the case.
Definitely need to do some rearranging to make space for my 2022 reads.
Dewey decimal system is the only way!
My wife and I are approaching 3000 books. No, not a typo. Rainbow or spine-in is absolutely not a possibility.
My 1300 book science fiction and fantasy collection is filed alpha by author, then by title. I’m strict about it, meaning it often splits up books in the same series (like the Earthsea books). A fellow collector thinks that’s insane – series should go together, in order of publication. But then how do I file them within the author’s other books? By the title of the first book? The name of the series? Choices, choices.
Thank goodness Ann Leckie’s Ancillary books all start with the same word, so will always file together. Yeah, it means ‘Sword’ and ‘Mercy’ are reversed, but at least they’re all together.
I am mostly an ebook reader now, and I use the search function to find the book I want to read. My spreadsheet list of owned books can be alphabetized whenever I want but is currently in no particular order.
For my one shelf of physical books, I have prose books on the left and comic collections on the right, and they are sort of organized by series/topic after that.
Shall we do the number of books boasting thing? For us, physical books, about 18,000 (yes eighteen thousand). Around 2500 electronic books.
Our organization isn’t perfect. Fiction is in three sections, though in all three they are arranged by Massmarket/trade/hardcover. Then alphabetical by author and title (with series by title name and then series number). Non-Fiction is arranged by overall subject (Artists/Chemistry/ Physics and so forth) and then alphabetical.
We do have to spend a lot of time finding spaces for new books.
Past a certain number of books, floor loading also becomes an issue.
@@@@@ costumer – Hahahaha, awesome! But now I can’t show my wife this post. She’ll see that and revise her expectations of how much house I’m willing to dedicate to this. I only agreed to half the place, darnit!
The ordering of letters in the alphabet is, of course, entirely arbitrary. Mix it up!
“When did you start to care how your books were arranged on their shelves? When did it matter?”
When I wanted to find something to reread it. I don’t keep anything I don’t want to read again.
So that I can find things, I shelve by genre; within genres, alphabetical by author surname; within authors, by series (for example Pratchett Witches and Pratchett City Watch), and then in publication order. Publication order, because it’s fun to see author and story development on the shelf (and because shelving alphabetically by book title is silly).
Like #4 Cloudyvision, I shelve author biography and criticism after the works concerned. (Glad to know I’m not the only one.)
Genre can be hard to decide for some authors. I have Naomi Alderman in general fiction (despite The Power) and Naomi Mitchison in SFF (despite her historical fiction) – my shelves, my choice.
Now that there are bookcases in all the rooms except the loo, and I don’t want them to get any taller, AND I keep getting new books, AND I want to keep the total under 2,000 (not counting e-books), I do a cull every year, going through every shelf and removing things that I don’t want to read any more, or that have stopped speaking to me. That makes space for the new items, and leads to a lot of swearing as I adjust shelf heights for maximum storage.
Mount Tsundoku tends to pile up in corners, but nobody’s perfect.
P.S. Shelving techniques are all very well – who’s got advice about cataloguing or listing their books, so I can fill gaps in the collection without double-buying?
@15 – I highly recommend using LibraryThing.com for this purpose. It takes a bit to do the initial set up if you already own a lot of books, but once that part is done, you can just plug books in (by title/isbn to find the correct item) as you purchase. Whenever I go book shopping, I just pull up my LibraryThing account on my smartphone to verify that I’m not double purchasing.
@15 – +1 to LibraryThing. The website design is cutting-edge mid-2000s and the service takes some getting used to, but it’s been a godsend in the “wait do i already have this” department.
When I originally put in my library I used a :CueCat scanner to read the ISBN barcodes. I expect you could do the same thing nowadays with a smartphone and an app.
I have several book divisions: fiction/reference/graphic novels/non fiction. Within those categories I go by hardback/paperback, then size, then alphabetical order. Which basically means that my shelves are scattershot, but it all makes sense to me
This is a beautiful piece.
And I envy you so much for having a parent who was also a reader, and a genre reader at that! I grew up in a house where the only books were the New Testament and a dictionary. My parents never understood my compulsive need to read, and for years tried to stop me from reading altogether because they thought it was bad for your eyesight…
@@@@@ 4: “The rainbow thing FILLS ME WITH RAGE.”
Oh, you’re not alone. It makes me HOMICIDAL.
But, in the end, it is its own punishment. Nothing screams “I’m illiterate” like perfect rainbow shelves.
As for books with spines in… I just can’t figure that one out.
Fiction is alphabetical by author by publication dates (or by series name for multi author series like star wars). Nonfiction by subject. Big books like art books on the bigger, bottom shelves. Half my den is nonfiction and reference books, the other half is my very favorite fiction. I put shelves in the stairwell, all fiction. And there are other shelves tucked here and there about the house. Everything else is in boxes or storage tubs on three big industrial shelving units in the back of my basement, including 60 years of Analog, and lots of Galaxy and F&SF. All books spark joy for me, so nothing gets thrown out. Now that I have my column on old books for TorDotCom, and I can say I save them for my job, my wife has become more accepting of my collection.
My wife and I take diametrically opposed views on this subject. Her Ian Rankins and poetry collections are in strict alphabetical order. My Discworld collection, Mary Stewart Merlin books, the Arabella trilogy, and such other series are in strict chronological order. Poor Dorothy L. Sayers is constantly flitting back and forth between the two; Lord Peter Wimsey is looking rather dizzy these days.
And we won’t even talk about my history texts. Someone said ‘Dewey’; I need Library of Congress. Fortunately, my office is in the basement, so a sturdy floor isn’t a problem.
I actually prefer Readerware. Great software; slightly different versions for books, CD/Recordss and DVD/Videotapes. Looks up a lot off the internet using ISBN and a host of features.
My own bookshelves are “organized” in a hopelessly idiosyncratic manner.
History books go together, religion books (both religious texts and books on religion and mythology) go together, mainstream fiction is loosely organized by country, writer’s biographies go next to the writer’s output, science fiction and fantasy go together, and so forth.
Each of these sections is… not really organized. I mean, I keep books together by author, but the way one author goes next to another is not consistent. For instance, Tolkien and C. S. Lewis go together because they were friends, but Ursula K Le Guin goes next to Isak Dinesen just… because.
And of course there are more complications. Off the top of my head, queer fiction as a category tends to trump other possible categories, so, say, Andre Gide, E. M. Forster and Armistead Maupin are in the same shelf. Yet Proust and Marguerite Yourcenar (and their respective biographies) are under French literature.
And then there are the books in other languages, which sometimes live in their own shelves, and sometimes don’t.
It works for me, sort of.
@@@@@ 20: “Nothing screams “I’m illiterate” like perfect rainbow shelves.”
See, it’s this kind of judgy stereotyping that makes me crazy. Rainbow shelves do not scream illiteracy. Owning books at all indicates that the person values them, either as objects or for their contents, but as the article points out, any kind of sorting system is valid if the person using it can find what they want when they want. As a librarian, I can’t tell you how many times I have had a person come in looking for a specific book and all they can remember is the color of the cover. In that case, a rainbow sorting system would work out very well.
I enjoyed this article greatly. I also do not understand the rainbow or spine-in shelves. Seems like a headache trying to find something, but you do you.
My sorting is very random, but logical to me.
I have a specific shelf that is just for my favorite authors, which includes Tolkien right next to Crichton next to King next to Gaiman. The other shelves are mostly by genre, but now that I’ve ran out of room, they are getting a little disorganized for my liking. Need more shelves.
That sounds lovely. I don’t have a lot of room where I live, so I use stacks of books or boxes of books as furniture (my bedside table for instance). What shelf space I do have I organize by preference of author for books I’ve read and by how much I expect to like a series/author/whatnot for tbrs.
If I had the space for shelves though I imagine (read: fantasize) that I’d organize it in a combination of preference, author, genre, read status, and intertextual relationships. I kind of imagine it as a kind of four-dimensional L-space but hey, it’ll be no more or less random than giving designations like Cotton Vitellius A.xv.
Can anyone explain to me why anyone would store books spine-in? I see it on home improvement shows in staged houses, but it makes no sense to me at all.
My organization makes sense to no one but me. I group most of my favorites together in one bookcase by series (somehow it works out that most of my favorites are in series). There is a graphic novel bookcase – which weigh more then you’d think. It is mostly filled with graphic novels but does have a little room left so there are random history books here and there.
There are two paperback bookcases which also house the smaller trades, grouped by series. Another bookcase is the leftovers that don’t fit elsewhere. My husband has his own bookcase and finally, there is the sadness of my unread books bookcase (which is full).
Of course, I have run out of bookcases so my manga is living in stacks at the moment.
I do know where almost everything is though so it works for me.
@@@@@ 28. AlanBrown
Can anyone explain to me why anyone would store books spine-in? I see it on home improvement shows in staged houses, but it makes no sense to me at all.
Careful librarians stored books spine-to-the-wall in the days before central heating.
Books so stored stayed drier. They were less likely to rot and mildew.
It also let librarians spot signs of worms and mice.
@16, 17, 23
Many thanks! Will investigate.
Let’s conduct this discussion in the spirit in which the article is intended–an article that literally starts with the line “Let’s not have any more fights about rainbows, okay?” Be civil, be constructive, don’t be rude or dismissive, and let’s all just have a nice time talking about books.
Update: clearly, there’s a disagreement about what constitutes a polite argument, here, so I will point to the stipulation in our moderation policy that reads:
Be bound by the decisions made by the moderators. This means adhering to any and all warnings. Normally one warning is all you’ll get, so take heed. Repeat offenders will be banned from posting further comments.
Ashgrove, I have a similar organization pattern. There’s an area for the books I re-read most frequently, a general division by fiction vs nonfiction, nonfiction by subject; but the SF/F (most if it) is filed by author, in loose dinner party order. If they’re friends in real life, they’re usually near each other; if they were not friends but they would have liked to be; or if they would have had some VERY DRAMATIC disagreements sometimes I put them near each other for fun. (Gael Baudino and Steven RR Donaldson are near each other).
@30
Those may be good reasons, but I do not believe that that is why decorators are doing it. Televised and photographed interior design is currently dominated by what I call “biggest all-white room you can fit on the foundation” and the colored spines of books interferes with that aesthetic.
That stupid aesthetic which needs to go away.
Books spine in might be fun for a TBR shelf.
You could then have a way to randomly select a next book to read.
@37 – I’ve considered this! But more so that everything seems fresh and new than for the random selection; I’m too moody a reader to stick with anything random.
Since covid forced me into a 165 square foot microapartment, some two thirds of my 800-900 books are stored in industrial grade plastic tubs under my bed. The rest are arranged in 5 cubbies: philosophy, European history, non-western/world history, miscellaneous non-fiction, and literature/poetry/mythology. Within the cubbies, no organization whatsoever: however I can get them to best fit. I dream of a day when all my books are free and accessible and optimally organized. But it is not this day.
There’s a hotel lobby in Seattle where some of my philosophy meetups congregate. It employs books-as-decor, with the spines turned in. I find it hideous, but that said, the books all seem to be bad ones, so maybe it’s for the best.
I’m a librarian and I have absolutely organized my (nonfiction) books by color before. I’ve got a fairly good visual memory for book covers, moreso than for author names, so didn’t take long to find anything, and I also discovered that there seems to be a decent amount of color-coding going on by subject: my white books were heavily art, the orange were heavily cookbooks, and there were other correspondences I don’t remember. It never took me long to find what I was looking for.
As a librarian and also an amateur researcher, I am aware of the power of serendipitous browsing: the discoveries you make when you’re scanning the shelves idly, and find the unexpected. That’s the reason my favorite book organization scheme was when a friend helped me unpack and she organized the books according to what subject she thought they were when reading the title. So I’d find the psychiatry case study book The Mummy at the Dining Room Table next to a book by Bob Briers on Egyptology. I kept my books like that for years, as browsing was lovely.
They’re currently organized by Dewey Decimal, as when I moved in with my husband he said he didn’t care what order they were in as long as he could find what he was looking for, and since the Dewey number is usually in the book’s front matter, that made it easy for him to figure out where he should re-shelve something.
Question for the alpha by author folks: how do you handle pennames? Use the author’s real name or their penname?
Generally I treat pennames as different authors, so Holt and Parker go in different places. The exception is if the pen name is well known to me, and there’s very few books. So my Wizard of the Pigeons lives with the Robin Hobbs.
And sometimes I’ll just put like books together, so my Star Wars novelisations are filed under Lucas even though the sequels are clearly Brackett and Kasdan.
@42: If we’re talking about authors who’ve published under more than one name (Sarah Monette / Katherine Addison), I shelve by what’s on the spine, grumble about it, and include the author’s other pub name in LibraryThing under “Other authors”. If we’re talking about an author who used one pen name exclusively (Paul Linebarger / Cordwainer Smith), I shelve under the pen name and don’t worry about it.
Absolutely agree that sometimes it can be easier to find a book by colour than any other method – particularly non-fiction for me as I can never remember the author. Plus its soothing to the eye to have a gradation of colour and size. So non-fiction is organised that way, except for things where I like the juxtaposition such as Weasel Words and the OED.
Alphabetical made me crazy, especially multi-penname authors and variant book sizing which meant you either have to break alphabet order or waste a lot of space. Genre organisation crumbled under the weight of genre mash-ups and genre jumping authors. At the moment, fiction is organised by read/unread and then anyway which way it can fit, although I try to keep authors and series together. I actually don’t mind that sometimes I have to hunt for things as I come across all these other books I want to read along the way.
I do have a master spreadsheet so I know what I own and what I’ve read and its on my phone as well – one of the columns is the rough location (e-book, storage etc) but my brain seems to file that info as well e.g. Bujold is in the back bedroom on the bottom shelf, Wen Spencer is the next shelf up and the Liadens are top shelf by the desk, but don’t ask me where the next Cast-In book is!
As far as I am concerned, the only function a shelf-organizing system should fulfill is “Can I find the book when I need it?”
Anything else is secondary,
Personally, I have a rather odd system, in that I shelve my books alphabetically by author (and chronologically with) in REVERSE, so that when I pull out a stack, they are already in reading order. Mass-market paperbacks on the top shelves, then trade paperbacks below that, then hardcovers, and a bottom shelf of oversized books and graphic novels.
Of course, all my shelves are also full, so there’s a bit of a problem. ;)
I was being overwhelmed by my books, and donated a couple hundred a few months ago while trying to downsize. The several hundred that remain are spread among bookshelves in every room but one of my 5-bedroom house. If there’s any organization, it’s by author (not necessarily alphabetical), or the currently-reading stack on my nightstand, or the smallish stacks on my dresser or floors of to-be-read or -reread books. I also shelve them flat on their backs; in my early 70s now, it’s just easier for me to spot a book without having a crick in my neck.
Right. *cracks knuckles* I, too, am a librarian, so I want some kind of order. But I also don’t like too much symmetry – it’s monotonous, boring, uninspiring – so alphabetical by author is out, because too many too similar books will stand together. Because of this, I’ve tried or contemplated several different systems for my fiction shelves.
Alphabetical by the first sentence in the book. This was very fun to do, but not really very helpful a year later when you want to find a book and have forgotten that first sentence.
By themes, subjects, subgenres etc. Sure, but when books are about found family, and space travel, and tea, which subject takes precedence?
For a while I had a fun order where I sorted books into conceptual trilogies.
I did try colour order once. Not only was it too symmetrical, it turned out I own too many blue books, and they leeched all the warmth out of the room when placed together.
For a while I sorted by the number of letters in the words of the titles. Turns out, far too many sff series like symmetry in their titles … so I scrapped that for the system I have now:
Backwards alphabetical by title. Titles ending in A come first; Amatka followed by Sabella followed by Dracula, then books ending in B, you get the idea. It’s perfect. It’s asymmetric but books are eminently findable. (It’s also inspired by a historical Chinese system – the imperial library, and an encyclopedia from the 15th century, were ordered by the rhyme of the last syllable of the last word.)
To tie in to the topic of the article, I also have a shelf in my bedroom, and the books there are chosen and ordered entirely sentimentally. They are books that I want to see when I turn out the light, and when I wake up.
(Comics/graphic novels are alphabetical by title – they’re mostly all the same size anyway – and non-fiction is ordered by subject.)
(And yes, I have a blog about this particular kind of madness: http://asymmetric-library.blogspot.com/)
+1 to LibraryThing too. I’ve got getting on for 14,000 titles and editions catalogued (that does include CDs and DVDs though), and I’m still cataloguing.
Organisation: by genre, then by author, then by series (internal chronology), then by title. So, in the converted garage, I have boardgames, RPGs, and the bulk of the SFF collection. The hall and upper landing have the remainder of the physical SFF. Cookbooks and garden related live in the kitchen. The sitting room has the Crime and Other Fiction bookshelves, along with the video and audio collections. 2 other bookcases hold assorted non-fiction, art and graphic novels. Regency and gothic romance lives in the bedroom along with a handful of books I don’t usually admit to owning (it’s literature honest!). The spare room houses comics and Paul’s non-fiction, along with especially valuable editions in the locked bureau bookcase. We also have books stored in the attic which is not the best place for them, but can’t be helped. These are mostly print editions duplicated on the ereaders that I haven’t decided whether to keep or not (usually because the series are split between print and ebook).
We do periodically get rid of print books when we pick up ebooks, especially if only one of us actually reads it. We’re more likely to keep print and ebook when it’s something we both like.
42. James Davis Nicoll
In answer to your question since, within sections, I organize alphabetically, I use whatever the name is on the cover. So many authors use pennames I couldn’t possibly keep track.
As for books with multiple authors, I generally stick to the alphabet. So, for example, Book 1 by John Alpha and Clare Beta would come before Randall Carter and John Alpha.
I will make exceptions for things like a series with multiple authors (for different books). The series would be filed by whomever wrote the first book and the rest would follow in series order regardless of author.
Oh oh oh I love this. As a person who loves books, and also loves Organizing (with a capital O), Lists (with a capital L), categorizing and the like…I love coming up with organizational systems. (I did end up as a software developer and my work does involve data structures…).
I am not one of those people that can tolerate having books all willy nilly in every room. I hate clutter, and I also like things to be neatly grouped. Before we had kids I was able to tolerate coffee table books and the like, but even that bothered me! Once we had kids we had even more reason to keep the books all in one place (and inaccessible).
I have a Word Document I maintain of my book inventory, and I try to keep my shelves more in line with that. I do broad groupings by genre (although since I read a lot of speculative fiction there is a lot of blurring between sci fi, fantasy and the like), and then group by author, but I don’t actually have much of a system inside of that. Some of my favorite authors come first (or have their own special shelves – I have a Tolkien shelf, for example)…but I kind of go roughly chronologically after that. So, for example, within my Sharon Shinn section, the books will be roughly in publication date (although series stay together). My Star Wars EU (an entire bookshelf) is all chronologically based by timeline.
As a not-very-visual person I could not tolerate the whole ‘books as rainbows’ things, although it actually would be interesting to see which colors are prominent and for which types of books!
I am lucky enough to have a house which has an office ‘library’ and I love it :) It’s also painted purple, my favorite color. When I was working from home I kind of loved that my backdrop was lots of books!
I seem to be unique.
I always catalog and physically store my 4,000 literature and history books chronologically.
So it starts off with:
-2016+Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol I
-1777+The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels
-1564+The Babylonian Genesis
-1355+Ugaritic poems
And in the middle:
1942+Jun 12 Howard Fast – The Unvanquished
1942+0625 Isaac Asimov presents The Great SF Stories: 4
1942+Jul 11 Irene Nemirovsky w. Suite Francaise
1942+0923 The Western Story
This involves a lot of research, which became more time-consuming as the Internet made more data available, but is also enjoyable to me in its own right.
I do store separately, in boxes, collections of music books, film books, baseball books, travel and hiking guides.
A relook at article and comments made me realize how creative all y’all are.
I’m not ready to go back to the library yet so when browsing my books-I’d-grab-if-I-had-to-leave-suddenly shelf today, I realized those books are there for various reasons–catharsis, escape, favorite book by favorite authors (for example, An Old-Fashioned Girl, which is my favorite of Alcott’s books).
Yesterday I finally culled a magazine rack in the den and put in some books I use daily–Bible and notebook–and other books I need to get back to. Magazine racks can hold books, lol :).
And yes, there are as many ways of organizing books as there are people and all work!
@16, @17 LibraryThing has Android and iPhone apps. If it’s got a barcode, the app uses the phone camera to scan and decode it. Since I haven’t been book buying for 3 years I don’t know if it inputs search terms when searching your catalogue (and won’t work with older books anyway).
The main issue with LT is that it adds the book/whatever before checking for work level duplication so when you’re shopping you have to search your catalogue before buying. Apparently the reason for this is the database performance hit. It’s possible this will be addressed in the re-design.
The other problem is the poor handling of different editions of the same work – there’s no edition layer between the work layer and your book layer. This can be a problem with different translators or newer versions of technical works.
In the present visual world of Zoom and broadcast news via the phone I have discovered a new obsession of checking out the background book shelves / titles and arrangement as an indicator of the spokespersons authority and interests
disregarding often what they actually have to say. Notice a big difference in office / workplace settings and home.
The home setting appears more orderly but less used. Another observation is bookshelf clutter with photographs and travel trivia items cluttering the prime reason for a book library
Led to a review of how I arrange my own life and collection. For the record I’m a ” can I put my hand on that volume in a few seconds, person, Looks random but works for me.
This is all fine, and my several thousand books are organised roughly by subject and sometimes by author, depending on volume of volumes within the category, but in this day and age the fact that I can’t also organise the ebooks on my reading apps on my phone is deeply inconvenient and actively rude.
“This desire can’t possibly set in at a truly young age. Picture books and early readers—and I say this as someone who has cursed her way through shelving them in the kids’ section of a bookstore—resist organization.“
*laughs maniacally* This did not in the least stop me from organizing my books by physical size when I was a wee thing too young to follow alphabetization. Which is still the closest thing to method in my mad organization now – most of my books are shelved in craft-store wooden crates, and the order is “what will fit the most books without damaging books or splitting series at the time when this crate was purchased”. Then I tend to never reorganize older crates. (Which means that my only true bookshelf, a small one retained since I was a preschooler, is still largely just biggest-to-smallest and consists of the Childhood Books That Weren’t Shared With My Sibs, aka Oz books and Anne of Green Gables and the like.)
I occasionally reorganize when a series grows to making its shelving uncomfortable, and I tend to try to keep an author with themselves, but really the biggest organizing principle is “when did I get this book? And how prettily is it stacked in its crate?”
Downside: I’m on the crankier side of “why can’t all the books in this series be published the same size, I can fit and rearrange blocks of mass market paperbacks much more easily than jagged lines of hardback and trade paperback and what do you even CALL that size, mister”
Many, many years ago I would sort my books on my shelves. However, that became a chore when things filled up, and you wanted to put a book next to another – but had to move them all to make room, etc. So I have had my collection in a database for about 30 years now. One of the fields in the db is “location”. I just put the bookcase room/number in the location field. When I want to get a book, I go to that “location” grab it. Doesn’t take long to scan one bookcase to find. :) My db was initially something I wrote in Hypercard (really!), then Filemaker, and then MySQL. A few years ago I switched to collectorz.com (yes, with a z). Wonderful phone (iPhone and Android), desktop, and browser interfaces. I can’t recommend that software enough. Yes, you can use your phone camera to scan the barcodes for entry (even if using the web interface). If you are in the bookstore and want to see if you own a book, just scan the barcode and it searches your collection. I find this software indispensable. I also use it to catalog the thousands of Kindle books I have.
when curating a library for personal use, all that matters is that the system allows you to do what you’re trying to do with it. if you were trying to curate a library for easy use by visitors, yes, putting your books spine in would be unreasonable. but if you never want anyone in your house touching your books.. well actually that’d probably be a bad system for that too, if i saw a library sorted like that i’d start pulling out books every which way just to see what they were until someone gave me something else to do. but it’d be a good system for hiding what books you have from visitors at a glance.
the way other people conduct themselves with regards to their personal items and business is none of yours unless you’re involved with it
What a great discussion! My own books are not very organized at all. I have a couple of bookcases that are mostly for books I use for my job. Other shelves are mostly organized by size, because it is easier to cram more books in that way. Lately I am trying to replace my print library with ebooks, partly to reduce clutter, partly because ebooks are more comfortable to read. This project isn’t working too well. Many printed books are not available in ebook format. And even after I buy the ebook, I find it difficult to part with the printed book.
I can’t remember when I started organizing my books. At some point in childhood I hit critical mass, the point at which I could no longer find a given book by remembering its position on the shelf. Then I divided them into categories and alphabetized by author within categories. I’m normally disorganized. “Where I put it” is my first choice organizing principle. I only resort to more structured means when memory isn’t enough.
I’ve always been an avid reader and hoarder of books. The past 13 years I’ve worked in the library system so my books at home reflect that. Alpha by author then title. If the series has numbers on the spine then those will go in numerical order. (We only put the series in numerical order this way in our Juvenile Fiction section at the library.) My non-fiction goes at the end grouped by subject.
Incorrect for me. I organized my books alphabetically by title at four. I asked my mom if you ignored “the” or not. I now sort by subject – format (paperback, hardcover, etc.) – author last name – book title, though I do group series together in order.
I couldn’t use a method that relies on visually spotting books. I can never remember where I left anything last, so I have to rely on putting it in the same place every time or it’s 20 minutes of “where’d I leave that book on X?”
A friend of mine who works for Apple swears by “Delicious Library”, but I think it’s just a Mac thing.
I’m pretty simple minded about this stuff; I’ve been sorting by genre and author since my teens and it’s always pretty much worked. So, one set of bookshelves for SF, one group for fantasy, most of a bookshelf for “in between”, and so forth. If an author writes more than one genre, their fantasy ones go under fantasy, their SF go under SF, their historical fiction go under historical fiction. It’s all a bit messier and more approximate than it used to be, because I kind of ran out of shelf space, so now when I finish reading a new book it goes on its side in front of the space I would put it in if there was space. Plus a couple of shelves have never really recovered from the times a couple of grandkids were having fun pulling lots of books off the shelves and making up stories they pretended they were reading from the books. I didn’t stop them because I wanted them to think of books as friendly things, you know? And they’re both turning into readers, so maybe it worked.
I think there’s rather a distinction between the rainbow thing and the spines in thing. The rainbow thing is about the books–someone has an aesthetic approach to the books, a feel for colour and maybe the “mood” implied by the cover art, stuff like that. So the point is that because of the particular way their tastes and mind work, their relationship with the books makes them want the books that way. That’s cool.
The spines in thing isn’t really about the books. It’s not a way of organizing books, finding books, or, really, displaying books; it’s a way of transforming them into whitespace which considers the costs in ability to either find the books or see the books as books, to be minor when compared to other goals which have nothing to do with the books. As far as I can tell, the spines in thing normally says that books are unimportant, what’s important is an interior decor scheme, and the books must be put in service of that. Probably an interior decor scheme I don’t like. And I mean, OK, I’m not going to say that’s an invalid choice exactly. But I am going to say that’s probably not someone I’m going to want to hang out with or see eye to eye with, because I’m not going to like either their priorities or their taste.
However, it’s not as bad as one thing I saw on an interior decor show one time. So they were saying, you want the aesthetic experience of having books, but I guess without the weight and taking up less space. So what you do is, you have this bookshelf, which I think was maybe particularly shallow. And you buy a bunch of books at random, cheap from a used bookstore or a thrift shop. And you (deep breath) cut off the spines, throw the rest away, and glue the spines into the shelf so it looks kind of like you have books. Now that’s evil. All so you can look to any decent person who visits like the kind of ratfink who would deface books to get a poor simulacrum of erudition.
A basement flood incident in my utility room in early 2017 meant everything had to be moved out while clean up/repair went on. That meant 2-3,000 books in the library (fortunately spared the flood in the utility room) got boxed up and removed, along with everything else. What a mess that was. . When they returned, I took a deep breath and commenced reshelving in general alpha categories (such as A-B, or X-Y-Z). Some letters, like T, turned out to have a *lot* of titles, so they got their own bookcase. I guess I’m a hybrid, because the books in the numerous bookshelves/cases upstairs are still shelved higgity-piggity, and that’s ok. Perusing the shelves can lead to some happy rediscoveries, while having a degree of organization in the downstairs library lets me ‘rule out’ finding that one book I’m in pursuit of – if I can’t find it there, it’s upstairs… ‘somewhere’. Having so many books is a ‘tsundoku’ issue (too many to be read in my lifetime), but it beats the converse – too few books!
I used to insist on sorting alphabetically by author’s last name, but I had to move back in with my parents due to covid and now my only bookshelf is one of those little cube shaped shelves where keeping books in order is a nightmare. There will be room for one more book in one cube, but not the book that goes next, so you have to shelve it in the next cube over. That extra space ends up meaning one more book in a cardboard box in storage. I gave up on keeping stuff in order pretty quick. Its been kind of freeing to be honest. I try to keep them sorted by vibe, but really books go in whichever cube has space. I started with one being a classic scifi shelf, but since there was still room and war of the worlds was already there, I put my other alien first contact stories there as well.
I love to sort and play with books. In my home, I refuse to count the books, but they are sorted by genre or type. Within SF they are alpha by author (for retrieval from storage), but nowhere else. Within children’s, they are sorted by size and shape (ie, the Beatrix Potter books, the Dr. Seuss books, the Francis books, Frog and Toad, etc). Nonfiction books are sorted by category and are always moving about as I need them.
The concept of storing by location and by date of acquisition is actually still used in closed stack systems, where whole libraries might have been acquired at one time. Boggles my Dewey/LOC mind, but makes perfect sense if you have a good card catalog / database!!! You can do anything you want if you have adequate cataloging software. :)
I once saw a secret door disguised with the spines of discarded books. I’ve helped to run massive used book sales, and books do come to the end of their lives sometimes, so I can imagine repurposing some old books in such a way.
I have to admit I’ve thought about putting together an “impressive” shelf to use as my zoom backdrop. But I haven’t done it yet. :) If i’m watching a youtube and I see a shelf, I will totally pause the video to read all the titles!!! :)
What a funny topic! But I’m here for it!
I worked in public and college libraries for about 10 years, then briefly at a used bookstore. And for full disclosure, as a kid, I also used to seriously “play library” and catalog my books with paper cards.
Now I have a frustrating problem: I currently live in an apartment in one state with half of my books and the other half live at my parents’ house on the other side of the country. So I have to keep lists (I use Goodreads shelves) to know if I already own a book and which state it’s in. T.T
That said, I organize my collection with me like so, to keep it simple:
Fiction all together (except comics), alphabetically by author.
Non-fiction organized roughly by subject.
Comics organized by character or fandom.
The rainbow system is super pretty but I could never live like that haha
The key point for me is that my personal library is only for me. It does not need to be easily browsable by any other being living, dead, or yet to come. I arrange it the way that helps *me* find what I’m looking for and then I have one special case of honor for irreplaceable favorites that is only arranged to look pretty because these are my prized possessions and I know exactly where and what each is.
Some of the organization for the rest includes things like historical fiction being sorted by time period. I probably do not remember the authors name and may forget the title but I’ll remember it was one of those set in the 20s.
When it comes to books, I don’t dress to impress. My shelves are floor to near ceiling, 3′ by 1′, gray, solid metal, bolt together, industrial shelving. The antithesis of wooden bookshelves with a built in rolling ladder or glass front cabinets (although I do have one of those for my antiquarian books that I rarely touch.
As for my books, over 95% of my SFF are mass market paperbacks and those are stored in cardboard (commercial shipping) boxes by the first letter of the author’s last name with the spines up 2 deep. I probably have the better part of a thousand.
Accessing them requires pulling the box(es) out and looking at the spines.
I just reorganized my books last week and I have to confess I did a rainbow shelf, which is entirely antithetical to my need for order and logic in my personal library. As someone who has stuck to a strict “genre-author-series” format for most of my life, it was a big change. Granted, my “author” organization was not alphabetical, but based purely on favorite authors, so I guess a bit of chaos was always in me.
However, there is also a reason for changing it up this time: space. I chose my (small) apartment a few years ago in part because of the beautiful built-in. It became clear early on that the shelf could not serve as only a library unless I planned on storing other necessities in non-existent space; thus most of my books remain at my mom’s, organized the way they’ve been since high school. I make due with two shelves filled with a mere 100-150 books/comics, some of which will be rotated out based on what I want to read and/or space runs out.
I have no regrets about choosing the aesthetic option. I have such a mishmash of books in my place that after months staring at them stuffed in wherever they would fit, a new organization system was necessary for my sanity. I do think that it helped my peace of mind that I had very few full series’ of books here; breaking up a series was always the part of the rainbow shelf that bothered me the most. It was jarring at first to have poetry and sci-fi next to one another, but I’ve also found it incredibly soothing to look at, especially compared to the chaotic mess it was before. And an unexpected result of the color-coding is that forces me slow down and peruse and better appreciate what I do have with me.
Whenever I do get a bigger place and retrieve the remainder of my library I suspect a more rational system will be reinstated. But part of me thinks that maybe it wouldn’t be terrible to have one shelf of prettily arranged books, just for the aesthetic. At the end of the day it’s my library, I can do what I want, and isn’t that the whole point?
Loved this article. Warm fuzzy feelings. Just do it your way and enjoy your books.
I have two bookcases that are fairly deep, about two and a half traditional paperback books deep. The height of the shelves are graduated in size – paperback height at the top, hardcover size at the bottom. Those top shelves have two rows of books on it with some random things in the space in front. I actually can’t see what’s in the back of the bookcase without moving a lot of stuff around. My method of organization is, therefore, if it fits, it sits.
Honestly, the only rule I have is that books in a series belong together. It’s a series. They go together. In series order. They do not belong on different shelves or in different bookcases. I’m not a complete heathen.
I have just a few hundred or so. Organized very loosely by subject matter, but also size/weight, after one shelving unit no longer with me was toppled by a 6.8-er in ’01. Linguistics, philosophy, gender stuff, books about landscapes/places and significance thereof, art, writing, books about books, Left Hand Path spirituality, reference, and science–the last with subdivisions of geology, prehistoric life, higher dimensions, and guidebooks pertinent to Cascadia. Fiction is by genre, mostly, but there is a special shelf of paperback sf reflecting my development over some 50 years, and another of kid-stuff that I didn’t read when young because I then was raiding the adult section. I don’t yet have an if-the-alarm-goes-off scheme but have taken pictures of all.
There were complications at one point–I had treated myself to a big tall bookcase from a huge office-supply chain, and liked it well enough, but in a while it developed a case of The Sags. Seems that “engineered wood” is not engineered that well. I wound up reinforcing each shelf with 1 x 2 and that fixed it, and now all the rest of my shelves are of that 3-high, folding stackable variety, of solid wood.
Never mind the to-read pile…
Chronological (mostly by date of composition, but may be overridden by subject matter). Makes nice juxtapositions. The recent works are loosely alphabetized by first letter of author’s name. And tend to accumulate in a second row of stacks in front of the regularly shelved ones, but all of those are in one dedicated bookcase.
Fortunately I now have a lot of e-books or something would have to give.
I read the early comments, but frankly, all my current books save a dozen are ebooks. Most of them are displayed quite handsomely in Mobipocket Reader, and I can reorganize them with a few mouse clicks. Kindle offers fewer choices but works nicely as well.
What is this ‘organizing’ you speak of? Heavy books on the bottom, hardbacks on the taller shelves, paperbacks stuffed in any which way where I find room–though I do have one smallish bookcase for the autographed ones (though I have to remember to move any other autographed ones to it as I find them).
I organize by author’s last name, except for my old beloved childhood Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Five Little Peppers, Anne of Green Gables, and Judy Bolton. They go all together in series order.
My Star Trek books are in a bin under the bed. Too many to shelf and I can get to them easily.
My library is an entire wall, ten feet tall by twelve feet wide. It’s full. I have some first editions kept behind glass, and my craft, embroidery, and quilting books are in a separate small book case.
My entire family is crazy about books. My son still has his Serendipity baby books, my daughter her Beatrix Potter tiny books. Getting rid of books is an ordeal, filled with angst and sadness. We’re all crazy about books.
And we each have a Kindle….
sigh.
The thing that is most interesting to me is that for me rainbow shelves are honestly easier than alphabetical ones. Who remembers where in the alphabet a letter goes (especially when one has Hebrew and English books all stuffed together but not only, not mostly, because of that)? But colors are easy to remember for me, more than anything else. Out of all the ways I’ve had of arranging my bookcases (author’s surname, first name, title, genre, setting, audience, some combination) I’ve always been able to find books easiest with rainbow shelves.
My fiction is carefully ordered author (of publication, since I can’t be bothered keeping track of pseudonyms) – series – chronology. The chronology criterion varies idiosyncratically between date of publication (Culture novels, for example) and the internal chronology of the series (eg Darkover), which works for me.
Natural history is organised by taxon.
My history books, a section now far too big to reorganise even if I wanted to, are organised by the date of the start of the narrative. I don’t make a distinction in terms of geography. It’s all history. In any case, where would I put a book on the Persian Wars? Europe, or Asia? Dewey and LoC agree it’s Greco-Roman history, but since all the Greco-Roman history is on the same shelf it doesn’ really matter, beyond removing the assumption that the Persian Wars are more about Europe than about Asia.
I’m in the process of classifying everything else by Dewey, mostly because I am slightly more familiar with this than with LoC, although I have used both. Some sections (sciences, politics, social policy etc) have become very unwieldy, and I decided to get on with it before the problem worsens.
My husband organizes his nonfiction books chronologically by what they are about, and his fiction books alpha by author.
I organize everything topically. Doesn’t really matter the order within the shelf: each shelf is a topic. For larger topics, they take over a whole bookcase (which does mean that if I want to find a book on spirituality or language I have to look through a bunch of shelves.) Only rule is all books by the same author have to be together. I own very little fiction, which all fits on a half-size bookcase, and it’s arranged by size (ducks to avoid you all throwing fruit at me) with any books by the same author together. Then I have another small bookcase whose topic is sentimental books and books by and about family members.
This all means that despite being married for nearly 18 years my husband and I still have completely separate bookshelves and several duplicate copies of books. Years ago I read an essay in Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman about how she and her husband merged their bookshelves after 6 years together. I always thought we’d get to that point, but I think if we merged them now the marriage might not survive.
About 5000 books, maybe 3000 of them SF and fantasy which I keep as a single genre (SF&F) as many favourite authors write both. So organised by genre, then author and copyright date, except series stay together based on the copyright date of the first book but ordered by internal chronology. Example: The Dune series sits under Frank Herbert, preceded by books he wrote before it, but the first book in the series is The Butlerian Jihad, even though he didn’t write it and it was written decades later. So Dune itself lies somewhere in the middle of that block.
Because of sheer numbers, most shelves are double stacked and fit normal size paperbacks, so I reserve a shelf or two for outsize books.
Similar organisation for other books – genres include detective/thrillers, history, various sciences music, art/photography, and so on. And to top it off they are all book plated and entered in a database which includes whether or not I have read them. Or if they are printed or various types of e-book. So I know that I have 185 books sitting on my SF&F shelves waiting to be read. Final thing for hard copies – anything unread sits spine down.
Does this count as OCD?
@ 57. K Mills The Kindle app lets you sort books into collections, though. However, you have to manually sort them. I have my collections sorted by genre, mostly but I have author and series collections as well. Most of my Kindle library is sorted but there are over 1000 books that are not sorted. I’m too lazy to go back to the synopsis of each book so I’ll know what genre collection to sort them into. The easiest thing to do is to sort by author or series but I only do that for the author and series that I like and have more than 5 books.
For my physical collection, the library in our house is full so we all got personal bookshelves to hold our school books. Now that everyone in my household has graduated from high school, we no longer need to hold school books in them so the book shelves in my brothers’ rooms got relegated to holding miscellaneous items but I took over my sister’s bookshelf and I hold the bulk of our recent acquisitions in my room. When my sister moved out, I took over her closet as well so now I have three bookshelves in my room. One bookshelf has my childhood series and SFF books, one bookshelf has my Japanese translated and untranslated fiction as well as graphic novels and my sister’s closet now holds romance, mystery and the rest of books that couldn’t fit in the two bookshelves. Everything is sorted according to chronological order in the individual series but the books are sorted according to how they fit in the shelf for the most part. My Japanese fiction is sorted according to publisher as well as series chronological order, though. It looks better that way because the publishers all use a particular motif so the spines are really noticeable.
I’ve moved many times in my life…starting back when I was 13 and the whole family moved from Levittown, NY to a suburb of Portland Oregon. Each time I had the frustration and the joy of reevaluating my ever-growing book collection.
It has always been about presentation and the space I lived in. The prime real estate was the top two shelves of the most visible bookcase when you entered my living space. That was my showcase for whatever I thought at that time was the single most important books that told me and anyone else who could discover the secret code of how to read books – who I am. Thus, that two shelves were always a mix of topics and types, Sci-Fi, Detective, non-fiction – it was all about who I was as told through the books I read and loved me back.
Perhaps it was being Jewish and learning to read Hebrew or perhaps it was the fact that when you looked at a spine of a book the easy way to read it was to read the spine from the right side long in on it. Thus I always arranged my books with number one of a series on the right-most end and then the rest following after that – going from right to left.
This of course always drove anyone else who was owned and kept books – completely nuts! I just always said with a straight face :”They just got it wrong and that they were doing it all backward, not me.”
As a twenty-something falling foolishly in love and getting married at 21, the first major move of my life was moving in with all my 3 or 4 bookcases to mix with my new wife’s collection. I maneuvered with charm and diplomacy to get to be the one to arrange all our books. Now, I had that first most prominent bookcase to fill – the one guest would first encounter when coming into our space to showcase who I was and who we were. The bookcase further in, somewhere else and not say in the main room was where all the Sci-Fi, fantasy, detective fiction, and so on was relegated. Since at that time I was going to become a Rabbi as my ultimate goal of all this college career – no it never happened, but that is another story, thus that first bookcase held my Judaica and such. To show off that I was a Jewish religious scholar.
Books were always arranged according to prominence as I defined it and how the space would accommodate the collection. Never by any reference to an alphabetical arrangement – always my own chronology or subjective sense of importance and of course always starting and arranging from right to left.
My books cases were always an arcane Fung Shai of my own devising.
After breaking books into physical categories, mass market, normal size (a broad range), and oversize, I shelve by author surname within subject. Fiction is alphabetical by surname and title (as an aside, it bothers me that few others than Sue Grafton title books in a series in alphabetical order.) Overall, I have few enough fiction books (less than two score) so that organizing them isn’t that critical. Probably about 70% of my books (and probably over 85% by mass) are non-fiction, which I do need to keep organized.
@42: by the name on the cover. I really can’t be bothered to remember that Isaac Asimov, George E. Dale, Paul French, H. B. Ogden, and John Starmore are really the same person when shelving.