Mihoe mentioned on Twitter (@Mihoe) that she’d blogged about her bookcases – or rather about the organising of same – which made me add another blog to Google Reader, but that’s by the by. The point is we’re in the middle of getting all our books up on shelves ourselves at the moment, so, naturally, the theme is one close to my heart. In a follow-up post Mihoe provides some useful links, amongst others a link to a post I’d already seen on Bokdama’s blog (since that was already in my Reader).
So how have we organised our shelves? Well, not alphabetically. I tried that once and quite apart from the problem of suddenly needing to move all books after A because I’d aquired a new one by Paul Auster, I found I disliked the extreme mix of sizes this led to, both from an esthetic and a practical point of view. Esthetically I find it more pleasing if most of the books on a certain shelf are of much the same height, practically I have had more books than I strictly have room for ever since I moved out of my parents’ house close on twenty years ago, and so I favour a system that lets me keep books of much the same height together.
Our current setup consists of four Billy bookcases along one wall in the living room and uhm, five pluss one bookcases also from IKEA but that I fail to remember the name of (chosen because they are shallower and so take up less room) along this wall which runs from the living room into the kitchen/dining area. There’s also this Billy bookcase in the guest/hobby room which contains comics and two 60 cm wide Billys in the lass’ room containing some of our children’s books. I’ll grab some pictures of the bookcases with actual books in them later and show you, but for now, here’s the general system:
In the living room we keep the hardbacks, mostly novels and biography, some larger size books on art, photography or nature, and my collections of Austenania, Wildeania and Milneania. Oh and some collectible children’s books. The latter categories are shelved together, as are the biographies, loosely sorted into literary and non-literary. The novels are sorted by author where possible (if we have editions of widely varying sizes author groupings may be split), and authors that are similar (in my mind) are shelved together, if possible.
Along the other wall we have mostly paperbacks, though some hardbacks have crept in. Travelogues and non-fiction are grouped (by theme/geographical area and by author where relevant) to the left, science fiction and fantasy are mostly kept to the right, sorted by size and/or author. Novels are in the middle and are organised to a certain extent; I’ve attempted to keep books by the same author together (size comes into it again) and authors are grouped according to a logic which probably makes sense to nobody but me, a combination of how well I like their work and perceived similarities of style, theme, genre or geography.
We’ve not finished unpacking all books, and so there are gaps – on the shelves and in the system. In terms of physical gaps they are nowhere near wide enough and we’ve accepted the fact that we’ll have to add bookshelves along the «spare» wall in the living room (behind the sofa) as well if we’re to have any hope of housing everything.