Thursday, February 19, 2009

Booking Through Thursdays

Booking Through Thursdays asks:
How do you arrange your books on your shelves? Is it by author, by genre, or you just put it where it falls on?
Ooh this is a great question! I used to have a pretty mundane order to my bookshelf; paperbacks on top, trade in the middle, and hardcovers on the bottom.

One day I was looking at the shelf and thought, "God, this looks boring." So I came up with the idea of colourcoding my shelves.

I'll give you a minute to laugh at my intense nerdiness.

It took about an hour or so, with the help of A, my best friend, but we did it. We colourcoded my bookshelves! They run from white to black and span two bookshelves. I think it looks great, except it's a bit more haphazard, and it's difficult to put books back onto the shelf. Plus, I broke apart series, like A Series of Unfortunate Events, to fit the colour-scheme, which I wasn't terribly happy to do, but felt it would look best entirely colourcoded. The final drawback is that it's difficult to put new books onto the shelves because they're pretty much packed to the gills. Fitting even a single book would mean snaking the entire collection down some shelves, and that's a lot of work in a small space.

So, was it a worthy endeavour to colourcode my books? Dunno. I'm still undecided as to whether I want to keep it; it certainly looks nice, but it might be best to just revert back to the original organization.

9 comments:

SmilingSally said...

As long as I could FIND what I wanted, I could do that, but I don't think I could find a title as quickly as I'd like. Here's my answer:
http://bookcritiques.blogspot.com/2009/02/booking-through-thursday-storage.html

Chrisbookarama said...

I've seen the colourcoding book shelves on design blogs. It looks nice but I'm just too lazy.

claire said...

I've done colourcoding before, but although they looked really nice, I always re-organized them back alphabetically by author. The reason was my mind felt cluttered when I thought about cbooks by one author being separated and staggered.

Beth F said...

Too funny! I can't seem to keep organized at all.

Olga said...

@claire: I know, I don't like them being separated and staggered either. I'm probably going to change them back when I get the time. But it looks really nice now! I'll try and take a decent picture of them before I do it. Not easy when your only camera belongs to your BlackBerry...

Dave said...

Olga, The B&W coding sounds great. Here's a version we noted on The Baltimore Sun's Read Street blog when we discussed the same topic -- it's a complete color spectrum. http://www.flickr.com/photos/santos/1704875109/in/pool-96822943@N00

p.s. Welcome to Book Blogs

Olga said...

Thanks for the picture, Dave. That's a lot nicer than my meager bookshelf! While mine is smaller, it has the same look. Thanks for the welcome. :)

Anonymous said...

Mine are organized by genre (most proud of at eye level to shameful indulgences *ahem, smut and chick lit, ahem* on the bottom), then alphabetically by author. I change it up every now and again to keep things interesting.
p.s. you're not a nerd. I used to spend hours as a child colour coding my crayons.

Olga said...

@rockitloveitliveit Well then. I don't feel so nerdy anymore. Thanks!