Organizing books

The more books one owns, the more important organization of those books becomes. Also, the more difficult it becomes.

If your personal library consists of just 20 books, or even 50 or 100, there's not much point in sorting them according to author or topic. You will always be able to find the book you are looking for with ease. As libraries expand, however, it becomes necessary to order them in some way, even if it's something as basic as fiction here, nonfiction there.

Hannah Gerson, in an article she wrote for The Millions (themillions.com) in July, suggests 10 ways to organize a bookshelf: chronologically, by date published; by color; artful piles; by subject/genre; geographically; in order of importance and/or goodness; secretively; alphabetically; randomly and autobiographically.

Most of these suggestions make no sense at all to me. A random organization is really no organization at all. Shelving books according to their publication date would soon become a burden, especially if you happen to own more than an armful of books. Imagine returning from a used book sale with 20 volumes and having to find where on your shelves they belong. And how would you find a particular book you are looking for?

By "secretively," she means placing the spines of the books toward the wall. She says this would make it difficult for anyone to borrow your books. Or it could prompt curious houseguests to take virtually every book off a shelf to see what the "secret" is. And again, how would you find the book you are looking for?

Placing books in "artful piles" or sorting them by color has more to do with decor than books. If that is where your priorities lie, then go to it, but why are you reading book blogs?

Autobiographical shelving, Gerson says, was suggested by a character in Nick Horby's novel High Fidelity. The idea is to order your books in a way that makes sense to you but nobody else. Books you read while you were in college might go on one shelf, books in the early years of your marriage might go on another and those from your child-rearing years on still another. We can often remember when and where we read particular books, so this method may actually work for some people. Not for me, however. There are just too many books, many of them still unread.

Shelving books geographically might also work for some people. If a book is about Africa or is a novel set in Africa, then place it on the African shelf. The trouble is, some books are about several different areas, or no area at all. You could shelve it according to where the author is from, but some books have two authors from two different places. This system just seems too complicated to be practical.

Ordering your books by their quality or importance might be workable, except that it would require a value judgment each time you place a book on a shelf. Ranking 100 books might be fun, but a thousand books or more? And what do you do with those books you have yet to read?

That leaves ordering books by subject or genre, the most sensible of the 10 ideas. Gerson herself says she uses this one, although some books don't seem to fit into any category, so she just stacks them in a miscellaneous pile.

Maybe next time I'll write about my own method of library organization.