Book locations: Our book shelves
Our book shelves are in a state of perpetual transition. We sort them out, arrange everything and by the time we are finished we need to re-arrange again. Unfortunately the space for books does not grow proportionally to the acquisition of books.
So this is the current state of some of our shelves. There are more opposite and in other rooms, but this is a large part. As you can see from the boxes and the general disorder we will never be done.
The books are three or four rows deep which makes it hard to find any specific book. This is the reason why I said in a former Weekly Geeks post that sometimes I can’t find a book I want to read. The books simply get sucked up in the maelstrom only to turn up again by chance. So far we haven’t found a solution to the problem. Just. Not. Enough. Space.
Wow, that IS a lot of books. Some solutions:
- Get rid of books you didn’t actually like. Or books that you will never ever re-read.
- Move books around: every month, take a shelf and move the books that are in the back of the shelf to the front (and those almost at the back, to the back). That way, you’re looking at different books and are reminded of them.
- Number your shelves and enter all books in a book-bookkeeping system such as Shelfari (and maybe Goodreads?), mentioning the shelf number for each book (this will take some work, though)
- Put all your books in a) alphabetical order or b) genres together (and then alphabetically)
Or just enjoy the disorder! Think what time you would need to make it orderly: is it worth it?
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I am SOOOOO jealous of your bookshelves. We have moved three times in the past few years and we have NOWHERE for our books. They are all in boxes in storage and I feel as though we still haven’t “moved in” to our house.
I know what it feels like to know you have a book and not be able to find it !
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Oh – and I would love to come and look through your books. I TRIPLE love books!
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I culled a lot of my books last year because we live in a smallish condo, and with a baby on the way, I needed to CLEAR OUT. I’ve since added a bunch of things back to the shelves (bad Andi), but they’re in better shape than they were before.
Yours look delightfully touchable. I want to go ruffling through.
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Judith, yes, at the moment we are sorting them by topic (when non-fiction) and author (when fiction). Works for now, but we are not very reliable when it comes to putting books back where they came from on the shelf.
Julie, we still have books in moving boxes. Mostly ones we want to get rid of. It’s still terrible though to have them in boxes instead of on the shelves.
A lot of our friends use us as some sort of library (the same with DVDs, sometimes I feel like a movie rental).
Andi, I know, I always discover new stuff whenever I go through them. That IS nice to find you have books you never knew about,
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Love the shelves – your bookcase look LOVED… and that’s the best thing to have…
Judith make some good suggestion – but to find the time to do that every month..
Thanks for showing us your shelves..
E.H>
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