Switching Up the Shevles

How do you organize your books on your shelves?

It's a big question.  A truly life altering decision.  Your books are, after all, some your closest friends and companions.  How should they be placed upon your shelves?  By author?  By title?  By series?  By date published or date acquired?

The decision becomes even harder to make when you have limited shelf space, and you have other items besides your books that need to be stored on your shelves.  Sometimes, you just can't decide how you should do it.  Or maybe you do, for a little while, only to decide a few weeks or a few months later that you want to take everything off and rearrange it all again.

I happen to be one of those people.  If I had more shelves to keep everything on in the exact order that I want them in, I might not be so prone to changing things all the time.  I mostly have to go with wherever I can get all of them to fit and be happy with that.

Every now and then I'll try something new.  This time it was organize by color ( for the most part ).  I even took a few of my nicknacks and placed them in front of their corresponding color, which I found very pleasing for some reason.  Some of the results are shown below.

The most enjoyable part in all this was when had all the different colored stacks sitting tall on my floor.  They looked so beautiful!  And they still do, even after being put on the shelves.  I love how it looks.  Color is a very important part of my life.  It comforts me, makes me happy, and can even be a source of inspiration when I write.  So to have all my book colors looking so nice is wonderful.

For the most part, anyways.  The trouble I have run into with this set up is that I don't have the perfect shelving system of my dreams.  So when I went from having everything stacked sideways and upright and on top and however else to use up every single bit of space I could, to having all my books laying normally so that the colors would look their best, I ran out of room for a good portion of my books.

This, despite however nice most of my books look now, is making me a bit upset.  Yet I don't want to get rid of my nice colors quite yet.  The time I spent working on this was not total loss, though, as I actually quite enjoy rearranging my things every now and then.  There are certain arrangements that I like best and that work best for me, but sometimes it's fun to switch it up for a while just for the heck of it.

So in the end, I love the sorting by color style.  It is, in my opinion, one of the best looking ways to have your books done up on your shelves.  I'll keep them like this for a few weeks, maybe, but then it'll all have to go back to wherever I can get it all to fit, so that the poor books I had to take off my shelves can find their way back on ( and I can put my series back together ).

There is something sort of enduring about seeing books stacked in all directions.  Having to go searching through your shelves to see where a particular book you're looking for is.  Filling in all the empty space till the wall behind them is no longer visible.  Having so many books that you have no choice but to use this method.  No matter how many other ways of shelving fail you, or how many times they update the Dewey Decimal System ( if you're crazy enough to use it at home ( which I might be ) ), you can always revert back to this method.  It will never fail you, and honestly, it will always look good.

Though really, won't books always look good anyways?  I think so.

Em