To want some kind of order in the home library?

[butterpieify]

We have approximately 750 books. No idea how we got this many, they just kind of built up. The kids alone have over 100. We gave away 250 a few years back and it barely dented our shelves.

Anyhow, we are very quickly getting sick of not being able to find the book we want, so I am pushing for a better system. We have a vague thing where books tend to be near where they were last read, so the kids books tend to be near the toys, the trashy novels and browsing books tend to be in the bathroom, reference works are in the front room, feminism, history, politics and sociology tend to be in the garden room for some reason, and literary fiction has a habit of being in the bedroom. Computer manuals and buisnessy books are near the computer, comics are high up or the kids mess with them, and outsize tend to be in the shelves under the tv.

This can not continue.

However, my MIL (who is a trained librarian) thinks it hilarious that we would try to impose order. I suppose our shelves are nothing after a career dealing with proper libraries, but still.

oooh i love book order. i have the following categories:

old classics
modern classics
childrens (classics and other)
ordinary books
DH's books
Text & work type books
Agatha Christies
Tall books
non fictions.

I've always fancied colour-coding them - i might do that tomorrow.

I cull chick lit/murder mystery type stuff regularly (except Agatha Christie) but everything else stays and dh is refusing any more book shelves. I still feel we have room but just showed him this thread & he says you're all a bad influence BUT we are off to Bath this week & they have a HUGE waterstones, a v good bookshop for signed stuff & good second hand bookshops.it's only second to Hay-on-Wye for book shopping

i got rid of 70% of mine over the last 5 years. coincides with having kids.
i've kept all my tech manuals from my msc. otherwise i only keep if i have a strong emotional tie to the actual object, or know i will read again in the edition i have.

i have a very well organised kindle now:)

I have section that include - reference, procedurals,a section called 000 which is cunningly disguised porn-lite, contmp fiction, book club books and bizarely one called charity shop - which is the section of bodice rippers and chick lit i read when ill and would normally recycle to the charity shop if it was a paper book.

i keep them to make sure i don't buy them again - i've several times bought the same book over again from oxfam you see:)

Mine are currently stacked up in cardboard boxes, while we redecorate. There are about 400 of them, and I love them. When I packed them up I put all their details on a spreadsheet - author, title, publisher, ISBN, purchase price etc...

When they go back up they'll be as they were before I packed them up - roughly by genre and then size. So all my poetry is together, all my sci-fi/fantasy is together and organised into series order. The classics go together (they're mostly Penguins, of a variety of ages), and reference and cookery books go together.

I have another big box of books left over from my childhood in my parents' loft - I refused to give them away, so they're in storage until I have my own children to read them to

I am in awe. I thought we had a lot of books but I am not sure we have 750. I really want to count them all now .

The bookcase in my bedroom has mostly DH and my books and some photo albums and 3 baby record books. Some of them are my books from when I was a child.

Each child has a bookcase in their room and all are full.

The bookcase in the dining room which is not used as a dining room has my 50+ recipe books, lots of DH's books and some piano music.

In the loft I have 3 boxes of baby books my children have grown out of that I am keeping for my grandchildren .

We organise books according to which authors would enjoying sitting next to each other at a dinner party. It works for us.

I do the fiction by colour, which DH could not believe when he met me. Non-fiction books are by general subject - one shelf for travel, one shelf for health etc plus one large shelf for oversized books. DH's work books are organised by topic in his office. Cookbooks are currently in a large pile in the kitchen as our bookshelf broke. Must get round to getting another one!

Kids books are done by size - one shelf for small books, one shelf for large books plus a whole load of books shoved into the shelves downstairs with the toys.

Someone's probably said it already but you have too much time to kill

I order my books:
Downstairs, in the sitting room, I have poetry, plays and philosophy (in separate sections) in alphabetical order by author. In another bookcase in the same room, I have the entirety of our non-fiction collection (excluding biographies): art, fashion, political histories, etc.
All self-help (i.e. the Kate Moss Guide to Style/ How to Buy Antiques) goes in the kitchen with the cookbooks, which, I figure, are a kind of self-help in themselves.
Going up the stairs is all of the fiction, in alphabetical order by author, and including works in both French and English (as both my husband and I are bilingual).
On the landing are biographies and autobiographies, in alphabetical order of the subject.
All the children's books are in my DSs room, in no particular order. When he's older, he can make up his own mind as to how and if he would like to order them.

My father has the fiction at home organised by date of first publishing. He takes enormous pleasure in telling people to put the book back exactly where they found it, and seeing the expression on their face falter as they cannot for the life of them figure out his system.

My sister organises her piles of books by size and colour of the spine.

Oh, and our books procreate, we think. We don't understand how else we get so many. We have an ongoing game that we play on occasion, whereupon we imagine what certain couplings would bring about, e.g. "Cross Middlemarch with Nick Cohen's What's Left, and what do you get?"

I like Fancy's system . . .

Lo, we have this problem - FancyALittle - I like your idea!!! Funnily enough I did once sort them, a few years back, and some time later we had a dinner party and a guest commented on how our books were well-organised. . But then chaos descended again entropy? But I kinda know where they are and a few days ago, when a guest was talking about aesthetics, I was instantly able to retrieve 'On Beauty' so we get by...

Dewey decimal system here.

We do have a relative of old Dewey in our village, so they advised me.

We have 2 book cases in the study and are 2 books deep, roughly in the following categories - science fiction, chick lit, classics, travel, funny, crime/thriller etc. One whole self is just Tolkien books, reference. There is also a shelf on the other bookshelf of computer books, all the kids books are in my sons room and in the big cupboard in his room are all the books that are too young/old for the kids. All the cookbooks are in the kitchen

problem with colour order means splitting authors and themes.

maybe i'll alphabetise them. that'd be pleasing.

pointy No, we don't have time to waste looking for books. When one comes in in conversation/thought, I don't want to then spend half an hour finding it.

I was so miserable when my books were in boxes. Now they're all in a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, built by moi [proud icon] and there they all are, my babies close to hand, easy to find. [very happy and contented icon]

I've thought about organising them - they are loosely organised but not in a muscular sense - but I'd get in such a tizz about which order would be best. I'd be the type to get a spreadsheet going..

YANBU. As for books doubled up [argh icon]

Ours are in subject matter (history, art, travel etc) and then the fiction into periods: Shakespeare, old classics, modern novels etc.

I took nerdish delight in arranging it thus!

get a kindle!!!

Mine are splattered round my home, with people on long term loan, and splattered, generally, round the UK :o

I lend out whole sets to people and tbh i have so many that have gone missing i don't recommend this as a replacement for the dewy system.

I like to have a bit of tension between adjacent books. My favourite at the moment is having Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park next to Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. It makes me wonder what those two authors would make of one another if seated next to eachother at a formal dinner party or wedding reception. Needless to say I can never find any book that I am looking for.

Wow, I have serious book-envy now!

nickel, I wish, but our place is rented (and teeny-tiny), so no go. Rented places never have enough bookshelves!

Oh yes, I like the idea of putting authors who might disagree next to each other, for some critical debate in the bookshelves.

I might pop Germaine Greer next to Joanna Trollope, and then Stieg Larson can go with Susie Orbach.

You have book shelves?

I am in awe.

ah well, LRD, maybe nex time...

OP - just wanted to say 750 books is nowhere near enough books .

Working on the basis that you can fit 40 normal thickness paperbacks on a Billy Bookcase shelf, and there are 6 (as standard) in one tall bookcase, that's 240 books per case.
That means that 750 books will only fill 3 Billy bookcases.

Now, bearing in mind that only about half of one's book collection should be normal-sized paperbacks, and that one can only fit about 20 thick hardbacks on a shelf, then one bookcase full of hardbacks should be 120 books.
so, if you've got half paperbacks and half hardbacks, then you've got a maximum of 4 of this size bookcase.

I've got 3 of that size in my lounge, plus 4 cases-worth of short bookcases (4 shelves each, all paperbacks), another small bookcase (only containing about 40 books) in the bedroom, another bookcase of the small variety (about 40 books again, as it also holds records), two long shelves in the spare room (probably 100 books each shelf), and there are 3 boxes that haven't been emptied yet (about 60 in each box?)
that means in my house I have approx 1500 books in my house, and that's still too few!

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Never again buy a duplicate book by mistake.