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The Library Guardian
Asking the hard questions in life: how do you organize your library? I’m pretty confident I want my non-fiction research type books in the office with me. Art books can be in the bedroom where the art desk currently is (until the Little Man moves out and I co-opt his room as a studio, which is the plan in a year or so). The pulp paperbacks are on the skinny bookshelves in the dining area, along with the bookshelf of cookbooks. Well. The way I’m acquiring them, I’m going to need a whole ‘nother bookshelf for food science and cookbooks, but that’s a concern for another day.
Within the non-fiction, do I group by strict Dewey Decimal? I must confess I never did memorize all of the sub-categories. Within fiction do I organize by genre, or author? Tempted to organize by genre so I can easily find related books – fiction in paper is rarely read hereabouts, we do most of the pleasure reading in ebook, and the Little Man does audiobooks these days. It has been fun to slowly introduce him to authors and books we like, plus it’s economical because there are often deals for buying audio and ebook bundled together. That’s helpful when he’s listening to a lot of books!
None of that solves the real dilemma, though. Which is finding the time and energy to pull the library apart and put it back together in something resembling order. We moved in, unpacked books onto shelves, got more shelves from a friend, unpacked the remaining books, were given books, bought books, ran out of shelves again… the bibliophile’s life, in a nutshell.
I think I may start on this one shelf at a time. Oh, right, antiques… do I separate those out and display ’em somewhere?
Sigh.
And so, Spring Cleaning begins…
Comments
7 responses to “The Library Guardian”
I thought everybody stacked their books by their reading chair??? [Crazy Grin]
The organization of books in this house is a combination of organized and haphazard.
The organization of our books is a combination of organized and haphazard. I’m waiting until we buy a house to get the library to my liking.
Organized and haphazard sounds about right…we had a small library room, mostly organized by genre, which massively overflowed. Then I set up a home office, so most of the relevant books are with me, but not all fit. Now we’re doing work around the house, so they’re on their third temporary home of 2023, all while a small furball races me and the book pile up and down the stairs. Writing cat is, sadly, illiterate.
[…] Cedar asks: […]
I have references, general fiction, history, and “What is this?” all sorted by author’s last name. Sometimes it works well…
My e-book and audio collections are far more refined in their sorting for some reason…
Foreign language books are on two shelves in two separate rooms. General research/academic books are under the foreign language books in the office, with academic journals on the bottom shelf because of the weight. The other office bookshelf is all environmental history. The former cat platform is general social sciences and some maps. The textbooks I use are on the floor beside the desk, so I can grab them for rapid reference. As are the current WIP reference books, if in hard copy. Most fiction is in the bedroom, along with aviation books.
We will not discuss the middle bedroom, the bookshelves in the master bedroom, the library, and the living room. Oh, and there are geology and German-language archaeology and Roman Frontier history in the little rolling cabinet in the office, with medieval and everything-else on top.