What does your bookshelf say about you?
How people organise their bookshelves may be one of the most polarising and viciously interesting topics that are fully safe for work. The same argument could be raised for CD collections, but who has one, nowadays?
It came to my attention that some people organise their books by colour to achieve an aesthetically pleasing rainbow gradient on their shelves. As much as I can appreciate the final result and agree their memory works in mysterious ways, I believe these people to be only marginally better than people who put books on shelves spine-first.
Who does that? Spine-first people are the same people that buy big books about fashion to put on a table just as a decorative item.
They defy the concept of books, which is to be read.
Aesthetics aside, the reading of acquired books could be a challenge, especially if you’re torn between books you’d like to read for fun, books you know you should read for culture purposes, and books you want to re-read for the 10th time.
My question is: what system have you adopted to organise books on your bookshelves?
Sensible people may opt for a plain and simple alphabetical order, either by author or by title, however, the risk to find ‘Magic through the ages’ next to ‘Mein Kampf’ is just around the corner.
The step from author order to genre order may be something many people have considered. The same people who I bet had CD organised by genre, too. The only issue with that is they would need a special separate purgatory for books they haven’t yet read so can’t be filed into a specific genre.
My book organisation technique used to bypass all common logic and go straight to the point: which books would I be embarrassed for people to see immediately?
The classics are right next to the door at eye-level, both read and yet-to-read: ‘Alice in Wonderland’, ‘The picture of Dorian Grey’, etc. In the middle section you would find my favourite books, fantasy on the top shelf and unidentified genre on the lower one: all the ‘Harry Potter’s and ‘Trainspotting’s. All the way in the top corner are my guilty pleasures: flings for a fun time at the beach without exchanging promises of eternal love. ‘Twilight’ and ‘The fault in our stars’. The bottom corner is reserved for books that are somehow useful or given to me already highlighted by my mum because ‘you could use that for your career’.
I have a special place for the books I haven’t read, and that’s my bedside table. At one point the pile was so high that I couldn’t see the digital clock on my CD player anymore. Then I moved to Australia leaving the books behind. But fear not! I always say that money spent on books is always money well-spent so I already have a new physical pile of books to read and to strategically put away, but I have a virtual list of books to listen to and an equally long list of e-books to tap away on my e-reader.
Technology tripled my procrastination skills and made my bookshelf organisation obsolete.
Image: via
It came to my attention that some people organise their books by colour to achieve an aesthetically pleasing rainbow gradient on their shelves. As much as I can appreciate the final result and agree their memory works in mysterious ways, I believe these people to be only marginally better than people who put books on shelves spine-first.
Who does that? Spine-first people are the same people that buy big books about fashion to put on a table just as a decorative item.
They defy the concept of books, which is to be read.
Aesthetics aside, the reading of acquired books could be a challenge, especially if you’re torn between books you’d like to read for fun, books you know you should read for culture purposes, and books you want to re-read for the 10th time.
My question is: what system have you adopted to organise books on your bookshelves?
Sensible people may opt for a plain and simple alphabetical order, either by author or by title, however, the risk to find ‘Magic through the ages’ next to ‘Mein Kampf’ is just around the corner.
The step from author order to genre order may be something many people have considered. The same people who I bet had CD organised by genre, too. The only issue with that is they would need a special separate purgatory for books they haven’t yet read so can’t be filed into a specific genre.
My book organisation technique used to bypass all common logic and go straight to the point: which books would I be embarrassed for people to see immediately?
The classics are right next to the door at eye-level, both read and yet-to-read: ‘Alice in Wonderland’, ‘The picture of Dorian Grey’, etc. In the middle section you would find my favourite books, fantasy on the top shelf and unidentified genre on the lower one: all the ‘Harry Potter’s and ‘Trainspotting’s. All the way in the top corner are my guilty pleasures: flings for a fun time at the beach without exchanging promises of eternal love. ‘Twilight’ and ‘The fault in our stars’. The bottom corner is reserved for books that are somehow useful or given to me already highlighted by my mum because ‘you could use that for your career’.
I have a special place for the books I haven’t read, and that’s my bedside table. At one point the pile was so high that I couldn’t see the digital clock on my CD player anymore. Then I moved to Australia leaving the books behind. But fear not! I always say that money spent on books is always money well-spent so I already have a new physical pile of books to read and to strategically put away, but I have a virtual list of books to listen to and an equally long list of e-books to tap away on my e-reader.
Technology tripled my procrastination skills and made my bookshelf organisation obsolete.
Image: via
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