Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
The Bookshelf
I’ve already confessed that I have 19 feet of bookshelves. And that’s just the living room. When it comes to books, I am decidedly not a minimalist. Yes, there are books I’m never going to read again, but just this school year I’ve pulled Angela’s Ashes and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings off my shelf for my oldest to read for English class (and how I wish I was in that class!). It goes without saying that I have opinions about how to organize a bookshelf.
First, let’s dispense with the most dreadful trend of the last decade, organizing of books by jacket color. This, to my mind, is not organizing them at all. A perfectly literate friend told me that he can remember the color of a book and find it when he wants, but I wonder: What if the cover is red but the spine is white… are you searching in vain through the red spines? I have organized coffee table books in a living room by color, but that seems different: You aren’t really meant to search for something in particular, but to peruse what catches your eye.
If you have enough books to warrant organizing, and I suspect that, despite your Kindles and your iPads, a lot of you do, I believe retrieval is always the best organizing principle. Put something where you can find it when you want it. I like categories. They can be pretty loose: Theatre, Biography, Classics, Short Stories, Mysteries. In my house Food and Travel go together. Art and Sports have to be on the bottom, in the biggest shelves, because those are the oversize books. If you want to arrange by size, that’s fine, but only within categories—taken to extremes it can make a room look like it is tilting.
You don’t need to alphabetize, you don’t need the Dewey decimal system… but if you can narrow your search to 25 books on one or two shelves, rather than 1,000 books on a wall of shelves, that should be efficient enough. And who knows what other fun book you’ll discover in your search?