Is there a right way?
There comes a time in every bookworms life where you are faced with a rapidly growing pile of chaos in the form of your To-Be-Read, Already-Reads and Re-Reads. There’s a certain satisfaction to the messy book reader aesthetic, but as a generally meticulous person, I can only maintain it for so long before it drives me crazy. And it is during these fits characterised by an intense desire for organisation that I tend to rearrange my bookshelves.
Now you might be under the impression that an organised bookshelf simply means making sure all your books are upright and on the shelf in question. You will very quickly find out in this post that there are numerous ways to organise a shelf, from the most obvious and logical options, to the seemingly non-functional.
Alphabetically
A personal favourite of mine, organising your books alphabetically is a traditional method. Generally it is placed in order of author, as found in most bookstores and libraries. The benefit of such a method is the relative ease of finding a book. However, this does require you to be familiar with the author in question of the book, which, unless it is your book that you have previously read, it is not always the case. My personal opinion is that this method is specifically helpful when your collection does not overwhelm the visual space. Once there are too many books, it becomes difficult to browse to find the book if you cannot remember the author. This is precisely why bookstores often have a two-tiered organisation system including the following method.
By Genre
This one is for the extensive book owner who has diverse tastes and has accumulated a fair collection in multiple genres. Sometimes these genres can be as simple as separating your books between fiction and non-fiction as I myself do. Other times, it can include multiple categories along the lines of Crime, Romance, Mystery, Fantasy etc. Bookstores often divide their books along these lines and then organise them alphabetically, making it easier to search for books within your specific taste. However, this is often more difficult to accomplish at home as most books will already be within your taste resulting in a lack of genres to categorise by.
Read Date
This is a relatively new system that I saw one of my friends do, but I appreciated the simplicity of it. The basic premise is by adding books that you have read most recently to one side of the shelf and organise the rest in backwards chronological order, placing the one read the longest ago towards the end. Not only does this minimise the effort required to keep your bookshelf organised, but it results in a fun snapshot of your reading history. Sometimes when I find myself in the mood to read something familiar, I struggle to decide on a book. Having an approximation of how long it has been since I read a certain book could help this decision. Additionally, this may the perfect system for someone rebuilding their bookshelf from scratch.
By Favour
A close relation to the timeline organisation method is to organise by your rating of the book, i.e. how much you liked or disliked the book. The marker of interest in the book would provide and interesting snapshot at your reading tastes. Moreover, it could also help to articulate the type of writing style you enjoy the most, making your future book choices more likely to be new favourites.
Read/Currently Reading/TBR/DNF
Another relatively simple one is to divide you books by their status. As any book addict, I am constantly buying new books, and sometimes when I put them on an alphabetically organised shelf, they get swallowed up and hidden by all the other books that I forget to read it and only remember months later, by which point I have already added numerous other books to my TBR. For this reason, separating them by their status implicitly places some in a prioritised position, constantly reminding you to either finish them or pick them up to start. It also makes it incredibly easy to find those books that you had no desire to finish when it comes time to donate a few books to make room for those new ones you’ve been eyeing up.
By Colour
Now this one is purely aesthetic based, and a favourite of bookstagrammers, but I will vehemently argue that some of the most beautiful bookshelves I’ve seen have been due to their colour coordination. It may seem incredibly pointless, however, if you are incredibly familiar with your books, and not the type to donate or give them away, including them in your house decor can be a good way to make it so they do not seem to take unnecessary space.
By Size
Another aesthetic option, organising by size can be extremely handy when you are working with tight spaces and small apartments or houses that require you to be smart with your organisation. This sometimes means compromising on reason and logic for the sake of storage, but turning to aesthetics can be a nice compromise to make the most of the space and exert some level of organisation.
These are just a few possible organisation options, they key is to find what works best for you, because at the end of the day, your bookshelf is there to help you! So have fun, experiment, change it up and potentially discover new organisation methods that work for you. Are there other methods I have not mentioned that you enjoy using?
If you want to see more images of highly aesthetic bookshelves, take a look at Part 1 and Part 2 or my favourite bookshelf images!
~S~
Featured Image: Photo by Alfons Morales on Unsplash
