I presented a short and rather vague note about arranging personal libraries on Facebook earlier this summer. Some of it read:
With such a small library, how in the world do you categorize everything? Alpha by title? Alpha by author? By genre? By height? Simply by where they fit on the old, wobbly book shelf? I’ve always been a fan of organizing my books in flow-form by genre. Maybe I’d begin with academic books, then go to music academic, book about music, then to scores, then flow in to plays, then go through poetry (if any), somehow jump to architecture (aka coffee table books about FLW), But then there are gaps. What about fiction? Then music fiction? Historical fiction? Where does it fit in the flow of the shelf? The tiny line of books in a sad parade, trying to look important and find their place… But when you have a small collection like I do, gaps in the over all flow of books don’t seem that monstrous. There’s a “new” (to me) way of organizing that I would like to try… Organizing by COLOR… I first read about it at www.designobserver.com (I love this blog!). At first I hated the idea. Does it look cool? YES! Does it serve any other function besides looking cool? NO! But if we are talking about small, personal libraries, then yes, it can do much more than just look cool.
I re-arranged my personal library in this fashion in between my trip from Tempe to Lake Jackson. One article I read claimed that you can create and visualize new connections between books when you arrange by color. Perhaps my library is two sizes too small, or maybe it is due to the fact that my books are spread apart on the IKEA shelf in our living room, but I was very unsuccessful in finding meaningful relationships between the re-arranged books. How do my personal finance textbook and a bible relate? Both talk about dealing with money at some point… How does Philip Roth’s Anatomy Lesson relate to Shakespeare? What does Everything is Illuminated have to do with The Secret Life of Bees? I suppose both are about finding family where you least expect it. I would need to do a lot more staring at my book shelf for this method of organization to be effective. If this happens, I will surely let you know. But if nothing truly extraordinary comes of it, I will move my books back to the way they were… ok not completely, because when I emptied my book boxes after the move I as unsuccessful in organizing by my usual flow-genre method. Maybe I should just do alpha by author. That would really force me to know my authors and maybe see some new relationships between books.
My only big issue is mixing my academic books and the books I did not buy specifically for school. This goes primarily for my academic music books and music scores. You know what- I want to go back to Tempe right now and solve this dilemma! If I sort alpha by author, some of the small plays and scores could be lost/hidden, dwarfed by larger volumes.
Anyway, enough of my ramblings, here are some other articles on book organization that you might enjoy:
How Stuff Works (subscribe to the podcast!)
Walking Paper – a blog about libraries, you can also follow them on Twitter.
Personal Library Organizational Software
Fun Book-Storage Related Things:
The Ultimate Book-Lovers Reading Chair
LA Times Article on Home Libraries
Personal Libraries to Die for
