Photograph courtesy of @finepreserversbooks
Looking through someone’s books can tell you so much about them, but the way in which you organise those books may say as much about you as the books themselves. Which of these bookshelf styles is yours and what does it tell passing visitors about you?
The Colour Co-ordinator
Colour co-ordinated bookshelves speak of someone who regards their books as part of their decor. Colour Co-ordinators have occasionally been derided by bookshelf psychologists and accused of caring more about the look of their books than what’s inside them. But often it’s more about making books part of your home and displaying them almost as art, rather than simply something to be shelved.
The Alphabetical Arranger
If it’s good enough for bookshops, it’s good enough for us. The big question is: do you go full alphabeticisation or do you organise alphabetically, within genre? And do you alphabetise your genres, too, from Adventure down to Young Adult, or is that overkill? Either way, Alphabetical Arrangers tend to be neat and tidy types who like a simple system that enables them to lay their hands on what they want immediately.
The Genre Grouper
Organising your books by type is probably the purist’s way, being closest to the Dewey Decimal system. It makes sense, after all, to have all your crime novels together, biographies nestling side by side and nature writing cosying up in the same corner. Those who organise by genre tend to be wide readers (those of us who only read chick lit clearly have no need of such methods) and they tend to be really thoughtful and scientifically minded. If you’re the sort of person who sees the inherent evil in having Jeffrey Archer cuddling up to Aristophanes you might well be a Genre Grouper. If you can’t see the inherent evil in that, you might want to take a good hard look at yourself.
The Chronological Curator
There are two methods of organising your books chronologically. One is to shelve by date of publication, so Greek myths at one end, the latest Val McDermid at the other. The other is to shelve by date you bought them. Now, bear with us, because this isn’t as mad as it sounds. If you’re someone who easily forgets author names or book titles, you might find you can more easily remember that you read a book on a certain holiday back in 2011, or that someone bought you a particular book for Christmas last year. It makes a kind of logical sense in a way. Either way, Chronological Curators are usually mathematical, ordered types. They think in a linear way but aren’t without romance where books are concerned, after all, there’s something lovely about seeing the whole of your book collection laid out like a timeline - of either literary history or your own personal reading history.
The Slapdash Stacker
Eschewing organisation in favour or a more ‘organic’ way of storing books, these types stack their books both vertically and horizontally, creating a higgeldy piggeldy but joyous library. You might assume a Slapdash Stacker is not a lover of books but often this method of book storage is used by real reading fanatics, who find that other methods are simply too restrictive. If a tall hardback doesn’t fit where it should on its genre shelf, where does one put it? And if your ‘H’ shelves are packed but you’ve bought a new Joanne Harris, you’ll have to get rid of a Mark Haddon, which might be very upsetting. Whereas if you’re a Slapdash Stacker, there’s always room for one more book… somewhere…
The Pages Out Proponent
If you’ve not come across this phenomenon, you might want to sit down for this one. Suddenly fashionable is storing your books with the spines turned in so that only pages face outwards, giving a uniform look… but meaning you can’t actually see any of the titles. Defendants of this method claim that actually in centuries gone by, titles were often printed on the side of the cut pages rather than on the spine, so it makes a kind of sense. We don’t like to be prescriptive but this is patently nonsense. We are not in the 16th century and people who stack their books this way are perverse. <gavel>
If you love looking at other people’s bookshelves as much as we do, don’t miss our My Place feature in our January issue, in which we feature some of the most beautiful bookshelves we’ve seen, such as this one, pictured above by Maureen of @finepreserversbooks.
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