Comments on "Book organizing" - Faerye Net

from urgent care

2008-11-16T13:52:35+00:00

Anne once had hers organized by color. It was beautiful. What is S book franchise?

book organizing

2008-11-15T14:19:24+00:00

Desperately searching the internet for a new system, I found your common sense approach which seems to deserves a try. Thanks.

re: response

2008-11-04T23:08:13+00:00

I will admit I’m enjoying considering a new regime for nonfiction sorting. shifty

response

2008-11-03T08:20:51+00:00

I have anthologies, religious stuff, and important boxed sets on the top shelf, unread fiction by author on one shelf, read fiction by author on another, and the rest is done by size. It’s okay to have multiple sorting criteria ;-), and it’s fun to go back and play with it when you get neurotic like me and have to rearrange something.

stacks

2008-10-27T16:44:19+00:00

the books to shelves ratio is my demise. I never have enough shelf to properly segregate types. I have the presentation shelf in the living room with favorites, particularly curious (but not so curious as to give away my deep dark secrets) or worthy texts.

Upstairs is the mess.

Stacks happen by influx. Library-only stack. Recent purchase/gift stacks. Faculty-author stack. I find anything on a shelf is Legacy Ordering. Thank you GreyStork for the term. I love the “Legacy Order” label.

Good topic, Felicity.

re: It's complicated...

2008-10-22T10:25:30+00:00

It does seem like once you cement the idea of where something is, it can’t be moved. For instance, the first built-in bookcase in my parents’ living room (when I was growing up) must have mostly been reference: I remember the Durant World Histories, a Wildlife Encyclopedia, and so forth. But it was also the most convenient to the big comfy armchair. So the copy of Lord of the Rings that my parents read out loud to us was kept there, easy to reach from the chair, and there it stayed years after the reading aloud had concluded. By what logic? Couldn’t tell you.

The next bookcase and half of the shelf system on the other wall were hardback sci-fi. Paperback sci-fi, often of the same books, was downstairs. I think other subdivisions included kidlit and literary, both in the dining room. Hmm.

Paperback Agatha Christies lived in a big box in the closet. I had to reach in and fish around until I found one I hadn’t read yet. :)

re: Organization

2008-10-22T10:18:52+00:00

I like to keep trade paperbacks of comic books together, as well…since they’re all the same size and everything! Chronological within series.

re: It's a two-step process

2008-10-22T10:16:22+00:00

Well, if you’d obsessively tagged your books with the box number they were in, you could combine organizing and unpacking ;)

It's complicated...

2008-10-22T01:19:32+00:00

There are ‘office’ books and ‘other’ books, in two different bookcases, the first of which is naturally heavy on the software development side. Mainly, everything is ordered by topic and then loosely by author.

There are a few oddities, though, that I’d classify as ‘legacy ordering,’ where certain books, or group of books, are placed ‘where they’ve always been.’ I suppose the latter is a matter of efficiency, sort of, so I don’t have to adjust my mental maps more than necessary.

Now that I look at it, a few latecomers have been assimilated into legacy groups, for unknown reasons. I guess I don’t really know exactly why my books are organized as they are, but it makes sense to me. It’s just another example of the bizarre way my brain works.

In general, I like systematic order, since it saves a lot of time when you’re trying to find something. I am not so fond of very stringent systems, however, since they most often meet an early demise, either because they get compromised by unforeseen additions that just don’t fit, or because they get too cumbersome and time-consuming to maintain.

There is usually a ‘golden middle-road,’ as they say in Denmark, which offers just about the right amount of order to be both useful and maintainable at the same time.

Organization

2008-10-21T23:19:10+00:00

I think to myself that I use an alphabetical system, but Glenn points out that actually I group by subject, then alphabet; for instance, feminist books on writing are all together, then alphabetized; all fairy-tale books are together, non-alphabetized, same with mythology collections. Poetry is alphabetical, except for anthologies, which are grouped, again, by subject. Writing about poetry (poetics) has its own shelf (alphabetized) and fiction is alphabetized in an orderly fashion. Art and large-sized books are stacked in no order on the bottom shelf, so you find “the art of Totoro” next to a book on hummingbirds. Comic books, writing marketing books, and other ephemera have their own separate shelf.

It's a two-step process

2008-10-21T22:28:55+00:00

I have not yet begun the organizational process! Step one was merely unpacking the books and getting them on the shelves. Step two, in which order will be imposed, will occur later, when I don’t have more important things to do (like sleep).