Hi there
I really love books, I always have, so over the years I have accumulated quite a few (I'd say I have about 250). I have also changed the storage of my books quite a bit. Mostly because I have more now than I had a few years ago. At the moment I have to big "billy" bookcases from Ikea placed right next to each other so it is like one huge bookcase. I have tried to keep the colours of my room quite natural, so the really colorful bookshelf is an even bigger eye-catcher. Over the last month I have tried out five different ways to organize my bookshelves and here they are:
By language
I can definitely say, that most of my books are in my first language, german, but I also have a lot of books in english and even a few in french ( mainly ones for school). I really liked this way to arrange my books. When I was in the mood to read a german book, I knew exactly where to find it, which was very practical. It also gives a nice overview about how many books you have in each language.
By author
First of all: it took ages to sort everything and when I was done, I hated the look of it. Also every time I was looking for a specific book it took a while to find it. I think this is a system that makes sense for a library, but for me it wasn't ideal. It just looked sloppy and chaotic.
By read/unread
I have almost 70 books in my bookshelf that I haven't read (I know, shame on me). This system really pressured me, to read more of the unread books, just so the section of the unread books would shrink a little bit. It also encouraged me to buy less new books because I saw how many new books I already had at home. You can either place them separately on your shelf or turn over the ones you haven't read yet. The second method even allows you to keep series together if needed.
By genre and series together
I think this definitely makes the most sense to someone who has a lot of different genre of books. But I'm pretty lackluster in that area. My books are mostly from the same genre (tacky romance novels). But it has shown me, that I need to read more from different types of genres. I mean I have some different genres, but most of these books are unread, so maybe I should start by reading those.
Rainbow shelves
As I have mentioned, the rest of my room is kept in pretty natural colours. So I have decided to go all out and sort my shelves by colour. I have had my shelves like this for over two years and I love it. My brain works by colors so I'd rather memorize how a book looked than what it was called. Also for me it, luckily, isn't a problem if a series isn't placed next to each other. I also think it looks the prettiest. But I always have trouble to fit a new book into the shelf and so therefore I constantly have to rearrange everything.
By publisher
If you like really neat shelves, this is definitely the way for you. In my experience, publishers often use a similar design and format for their books, so the ones from the same publisher all have the same height. With this method, series are also together which I know is important to a lot of people. I really liked this and I can see myself going back to this in the future.
I have found out that rainbow shelves with all the unread books turned around works best for me. I can find any book pretty easily and after one look I know, whether I have read this book or not. But I'll never say no to trying out new ways to organize my bookshelf.
I really hope you enjoyed this blogpost and let me know how you organise your bookshelf.
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