Kate says

I have many alternative worlds, all on my bookshelf. Working at BookLikes.com Say hello: kate at booklikes dot com

How to arrange books on shelves? Tricky bookish question!

I’m a freshman in ebook revolution and e-ink reading experience and I still have warm feelings towards paper books, but now when I finally bought a Kindle I suppose my virtual bookshelf will be more often visited so it’s high time to make some cleanup on my home-based bookshelf which is in a total mess and begging me to take care of it. So now I have a dilemma, how to arrange my books? I hope that this arrangement will last more that couple of days (as I’m scatterbrain in this respect) so I want to do it decently.

 

I suppose several solutions can be applied:

 

Solution no. 1. As a female and in contrast to some men (including my partner) I diversify more than standard colors and they really matter to me. I saw somewhere this ‘rainbow’ bookcases and loved it. However, I’m not sure whether books should be only treated as decorations. How I will find a given title? As far as I enjoy looking and judging book covers, I rarely remember book band’s color.

 

Solution no. 2. To make book search easier I suppose I should apply library standard and alphabetical order and author’s shelves. I enjoy reading series and I’m quite loyal to authors that I enjoy reading so that’s not a bad idea. But what about book themes?

 

Solution no. 3. Maybe I should shelve then according to literary genres? Then single books would get it’s right place and it would be much easier to follow my reading preferences in real life, not only on virtual bookshelf.

 

Solution no. 4. It seems that everything is easier on virtual shelves as book sizes doesn't matter so much here. So maybe book arrangements by it’s format would be better. Actually that could look nice and neat, however, the problem with book search could occur here as well.

 

Solution no. 5. Well, books from the same publishing house have the same format, cover color shades, similar typography, including covers. That would be something! Right, if I didn’t have single books from different publishers and I have quite a lot of them. That sounds like a mess again.

 

Solution no. 6. There’s still another solution possible, meaning random book stock. Place as it goes, put it on a pile and pray that it didn't fall down on you.

 

What do you think? I appreciate any advices. Do you have your own ideas for book arrangements on you home based bookcases? I’m curious :-) 

 

P.S. Human bookshelf looks intriguing. However, I need to resign from this idea, it's totally impractical ;-)