I can only imagine how many books I have in my house, in my car, and some even in the garage. There are books everywhere. Literally! While I have a fair amount of bookshelves in the house, there never seems to be enough space to hold my book buying obsession, which means that there is no system of organization and I want to change that. Just recently I took all the cookbooks on the shelf in our kitchen and organized them into size and type of food. It was an all day job, but the end result is gorgeous and I’m proud of the work I did. Cookbooks are easy, but other books aren’t. Over the years I have accumulated so many genres of books it’s unbelievable (fiction, non-fiction, biographies, self-improvement, text books from high school, and sports, just to name a few). I could open a bookstore!
This leads me to wonder, how do you organize your bookshelves? Are they in any kind of order? Your help is greatly appreciated…
**TO BE CONTINUED ONCE I’M IN THE PROCESS OF SOME KIND OF ORGANIZATION PROCESS**
I’m like you, books here there and everywhere. However, I’m in the process of getting ready to purge (note the wishy-washy aspect of that sentence).
Along with my library and Partners in Print, I’m donating a large portion of my books to a project that will provide disadvantaged youth with books I’ve once loved.
Also, I’m donating my one time reads to our libary for their annual book sale fundraiser.
In this way, everybody wins. Because if I don’t, my books might just take over our home.
Best luck figuring out how to organize yours!
Thanks so much for your comment! Donating is a great way to share the gift of reading to other people!
Like you, I have books all over the house. My wife and I both love to read and collect books. I have books from a lot of categories, including history, martial arts, warfare, bicycle racing, mythology, Icelandic sagas, paranormal studies, self improvement, writing, music, science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, poetry, romance, biography, cooking, and a lot of others too numerous to list, or remember. We organize our books by category, like you would in a library. I’ve run out of room on some shelves and had to split up some categories. We feel that you can never have too many books, however you can have too little space to store and display them all.
Larry, thanks for your comment! Yes, the space in a home can definitely make being a book lover frazzled for space, but wouldn’t it be a great idea to buy a another home and have it just for books? Ha, ha!
I got my library under control by literally getting rid of the physical books – I had thousands of them – and getting the e-book versions. My current library has 4,402 books – and almost half of them are on my iPod touch, which goes with me everywhere and, yep, it has the space to hold every last one of them whenever I get around to loading them all. I have a rather cool program that helps me keep track of all this reading material on my computer; everything is categorized by genre and I can view my library pretty much in any order I care to. In a lot of cases, buying an e-book is less expensive than buying a real book; why pay, say, $29.95 for a book when the e-book version might cost $3.99?
Even better, most of them are in a format that makes it easy for me to share books with others; no more lending/giving them my precious book and they don’t return it, damage it, something like that – I can just give them a copy of the one I have and keep right on reading!
There was a time when I thought the Kindle and other e-book readers were totally useless – but I’ve since learned otherwise! Goodbye bookshelves lining the walls! So long damaged books – the cat can’t sharpen her claws on my iPod! Later to that old, moldy, book smell! No more squinting at typefaces with eyes that are getting older – just a couple of taps and, yep, now it’s big enough to read easily and without straining the old eyes further!
No more trying to remember where I last had a book; it’s in one of two places – my iPod or my computer and, like I said, I don’t go anywhere without my iPod!
I’m a voracious reader and my iPod makes it easy for me to read what I want, whenever I want, and wherever I want to do it! And I can put it in my pocket – how cool is that?