There is a lovely online debate going on about how best to organise your bookshelves. It falls under that more general heading of ‘cataloguing disputes’ or ‘making lists about lists’.
Here are Stephen Moss’s reflections:
Ah, how to organise one’s bookshelves? One of life’s central questions, and well done Alexander McCall Smith for raising it on Twitter yesterday. Perhaps not everyone would consider this a vital topic, but for me it is. Just as Casaubon in Middlemarch is trying to find “the key to all mythologies” (the title of his unfinished book), so I believe that if I can arrange my library properly, everything will be solved. Who needs the Higgs boson? The real key is where to file The Iliad. Poetry or history?
I have about a dozen categories. Fiction is the largest. It is arranged alphabetically by author and then chronologically where I have several titles by the same writer. There are sections devoted to poetry, memoir, biography, essays, travel writing and plays, all organised alphabetically. Books in these categories have a better chance of surviving than novels, which tend to be culled first. There are smaller sections, more loosely organised, devoted to dictionaries, reference works, art, music, sport and chess. I also have a shelf of foundation texts – the Bible, the Qur’an, the Mahabharata, Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and the modern philosophers. I admit this shelf is very inaccessible.
History is a large section. It begins with general histories, and then takes a predictable course from Sumeria and Egypt to the Third Reich. There is a problem with a book such as Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland 1600-1972, because I don’t have a separate Irish section and can’t decide whether it should be in general histories or in chronological sequence. For the moment it sits awkwardly in the 17th century, next to Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches. Clearly I need to spend the rest of the day assessing this. One day, when I build my book annexe, all these questions will be resolved. Then, the whole of existence will be mapped, classified, ordered, and I can die happy. George Eliot was unnecessarily cruel to Casaubon. He was definitely on to something.
There are some lovely comments below his piece:
melymnn: I organize my books by publisher and colour and I’m not even ashamed to admit it. Come at me, bro.
Gdhsyerehdjsue: I have colourbetised my books and it looks great.
Mark Barnes: My entire collection is organised by Dewey, and catalogued on LibraryThing.com. Perhaps I need to get out more. That said, not only can I easily find my own books, but I now know exactly where to go in most libraries I visit.
msmlee: The WORST way to organise bookshelves is by an immediately discernible order to the untrained, non-bibliophile eye — you are not running a public library, you are arranging your bookshelves as a means of self expression, why do it so that others could find your books easily without having acquired your particular history of book encounters??? No, the right way to shelve books is not alphabetically, not chronologically, and certainly not by colour. I can stomach somebody’s bookshelves arranged broadly by subject, but that is only elementary level to book organising. You have to organise books in such a way that ONLY YOU know the rhyme and reason for these books being together, and really showed that you have actually READ the books to know what they are about before filing them.
ontheotherhand2010: Not trying to sound aggressive or anything, but… Who cares. Get a life. As long as you can find them, why does it matter? FYI I have mine in about half a dozen fairly broad categories or so (not alphabetical), which is enough for me to know roughly where they are located. I stopped being pedantic with the exact location of my books in my late teens. Maybe you should give it a rest as well…
To this last commentator I’d reply: If you can’t understand why someone wants to catalogue and sort and order and list and arrange and argue and shape and obsess and file and group and re-group and on and on and on, without it having to be explained to you, then you never will. It’s part of being human. Maybe the obsessiveness isn’t, but the impulse is.
Bridges and Tangents 
Many, many years ago, probably before you were born, I was a sixth-former with a Saturday job in a public library. Ever since then, I’ve refused to catalogue my books properly. Please forgive me, but it just seems so anal.
PS: George Eliot was not being unkind to Casaubon. She spotted a serious flaw that afflicts many of our gender. The poor, self-deluding man was trying to impose rigid order on a system which is fundamentally fluid!
;0)
My bookcase in the hallway was made lovingly by my Daddy, 6 metres by 2 metres. It is un-organised wildly by genre.
My very very special books upon the book case above my bed are organised in the order of my journey in order of their coming. 2 shelves read and unread. One book leads to another…leads to another….leads to another.
My bedside drawer is only for very special books, both ones to give and ones to treasure. My closest books are closest by, my suede treasure, my bible, my Catechism.. and so to hand my current reading.
I love reading a book and then finding a home for it on my bookshelves. I definitely follow msmlee’s method of filing. I know where a book goes but no one else would. I have different sections including books my book group has either read or people in the book group have recommended and a section of books written by people to whom awful things have happened. Christian writers are divided into mystics, prayer and then everything else is ordered by the country the author comes from so the Yanks are together, the Brits and then the Aussies (really there are some!).
My husband has a study with 36 metres of shelving (8 IKEA Billy bookcases). Every book is hard back. Four bookcases are fiction in alphabetical order by author and then title within author, one case history, one sport, one biography and one with everything else. If someone gives him a paperback it either gets shoved in a drawer or he’ll re buy it in hardback.
Our love of ordering doesn’t stop with books, 600 DVDs are arranged into Kids animated and non animated, women’s movies, men’s movies and TV box sets. Sadly I also have the kids Lego neatly sorted into 4 boxes (bricks, tiles, small pieces and other odd shaped pieces). A good friend (after too much wine) once told me “I do love you, you’re so anal”, I think she meant it more as an observation than a compliment, but we are who we are!
Categorising my bookshelves is important to me as my books are important. I have organised them according to subject matterand size – one of my bookcases only accomodates paperbacks. It’s a system that works for me. The trouble is that I’m finding that I will soon need to buy another bookcase. Ikea here I come!
I would like to wish you Fr Stephen and all my fellow Bridges and Tangents readers a very Happy Christmas full of blessings.
Once you have LibraryThing it doesn’t matter how you order the physical books at all. You can have order and chaos.
Saint Augustine? Challenge yourself. Google First Scandal.
This reminds me of John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany”, wherein Owen has his baseball card collection arranged in a very specific (and indeterminate by others) method.
My books are arranged very specifically as well: absolute top favorites are in my room in a safe place, others are on bookshelves according to category: horses, philosophy and religion, poetry, dogs, all other animals, favorite novels, art and history, “other”. Within each category, I arrange according to height and color.
It takes one to know one.
The day after I read this post, one of my friends put the following link on Facebook: http://bookshelfporn.com/. And I’m definitely with the height and colour followers – books have to look as good as they are loved and life is too boring if you can find them straight away.