Booking Through Thursdays

Booking Through Thursdays asks:

Collectibles:
• Hardcover? Or paperback?
• Illustrations? Or just text?
• First editions? Or you don’t care?
• Signed by the author? Or not?

I’ll pretty much collect any and all books that fascinate me. I don’t really have the money to collect valuable books right now, but that doesn’t stop me from collecting. I have a pile of moldering old books I got from an estate sale. Seriously. They are actually moldering. The spines are crumbling, the pages are transluscent and I’m fairly sure the covers have been nibbled by mice. And they’re probably not worth much, but they make me happy so I keep them.

And I always keep my author-signed books. Most of them are specifically addressed to me, so they're not valuable to any one else other than...you know, the army of other Olgas!

Image source: heidiologies

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.