Investigated – How do you organize your shelves?

Posted March 30, 2015 by Emily in Investigated / 5 Comments

investigated

I’ve been kind of debating whether to reorganize my shelf or not. There are just so many ways to do it. I know some people who organize their shelves by spine color. Other people do theirs by genre. Some do it by title or series or paperback/hardcover or signed and not signed or author. Personally, I organize my shelves by the author’s last name, then their first name. Books by the same author get organized alphabetically by title, unless it is part of a series, which I organize by series order. That’s just the way I’ve been taught to organize books on shelves so that’s the way I’ve been doing it. I guess that’s what you get when you have worked and volunteered at a library for so long.

I tried doing rainbow shelves before and they looked really nice until my OCD caught up and I felt the need to make sure every shade was in the right spot. (And then I realized I couldn’t find any of the books I was looking for very quickly…). Yeah, it didn’t take long before I went back to by original way of shelving books. To be fair, I have three separate shelf “areas”. The main area is home to all of nice, mostly YA, books. Then I have another area for ARCs and other books. The final area is a mess because it is basically my oldest bookshelf with all the books from my childhood. On that shelf, you can find books like Because of Winn-Dixie and The Penderwicks, but all my Percy Jackson Heroes of Olympus books sit nicely on my main shelves (I made a deal with the devil, er I mean brother. He got to keep the original PJO series, which are all paperbacks in his room while I got all of our hardcover HOO books).

So that’s me, what about you?
How do you organize your bookshelves?
What is your favorite way?

Emily

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5 responses to “Investigated – How do you organize your shelves?

  1. I always have, and always will, organize my shelves by last names. I’ve always thought rainbow shelves looked pretty, but as you mentioned, I’m too OCD and could spend hours debating the placement of a handful of books. And I would fail miserably at finding things.