Investigated – How do you organize your shelves?

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?

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