How do you organize your books?

[Mickey]

How do you organize your home libraries, nerdfighters?

 

I own many hundreds of books, all packed into my tiny room. My shelves don't leave much room for creativity, so I cannot use the celebrated 'color-gradient' organizing method. I've opted for a rough category system instead. Librarything.com helped me out a lot!

These are my current categories:
 -reference
-fantasy / urban fantasy
-sci-fi
-'real' literature (classics / modern classics)
-nonfiction
-poetry
-books about books/writing
-historical fiction
-YA
-YA authors who are friends (John / Maureen / E. Lockhart / Scott Westerfeld / David Levithan, etc.)

Edit, November 2011: Hiya! It's been a while since this post, and since then my home library has changed. I've got fiction, YA, nonfiction, biography + memoir, drama, poetry, reference, and travel. This makes a bit more sense than the last system, I think! 

If you're interested, I've got my whole library photographed and catalogued here. Enjoy!

 

[Bella Doyle]

Usually by:

-favorites
-collections of each author
-signed books (only have a couple)
-fantasy related
-realistic fiction

But it's hard to really organize. Up until recently I owned almost 400 books but I started running out of room so I donated a lot of them to my local library

[Mallory]

I wish I had that many books! I'm just starting my collection. I used to borrow a lot of books, but now I'm starting to buy them more often.

Right now, I only have about 40 showcased and another 20 on the top shelf in my closet. More are in boxes, because they're from when I was a kid.
The books I have out in the open are organized in alphabetical order by the author, but more often then not they're organized by height. I've tried by colour gradients, but it's that would call for separating series, which is something I'm not prepared to do. Can you imagine your Harry Potter books split up?

[ProudR/HrShipper]

I reorganize my books a lot, but currently they're arranged according to the Dewy Decimal System. Nonfiction on the top shelf, then fiction alphabetically by author.

Like some others I've seen here, I keep my Harry Potter collection separate - I actually keep them with my Twilight books (chill out! I don't even like Twilight anymore!) so that the two can learn to coexist peacefully. :P

[Eva Stoops]

I have one shelf for my favorites, and one shelf for everything else. My favorites shelf is all fantasy, and the top shelf is devoted mostly to Harry Potter and Werewolf/Vampire fantasy, and the second is devoted to everything else.
My other book shelf has three shelves. The first is small books, the second is manga, and the last is really tall books and books I haven't read yet.

[Charles]

I don't have that much room so I stick it on the shelf and hope I can remember where I put it.

[Rockccoli]

I've got about 300 right now and they are essentially unorganized. :)

However, I do pose action figures in front of the gushy romance books in an effort to de-gushify them a little. So does that count as organization?

[Abbyhatch]

I think you can get a good understanding of my organisation system when you look at my shelf of textbooks. Logic would dictate I organise them by subject, but it looks so much prettier when organised by height! This does mean that reading left to right, the subject of each book is: Course selection, Religion, Human Bioscience, Childhood Language, Anatomy, Statistics, Complex Communication, Clinical Methodology, Sound disorders, Language Development, Sound Disorders, Statistics, Fluency, Phonetics, and Human Anatomy & Physiology. Oh, and then a copy of Alice in Wonderland balanced on top because it wouldn't fit anywhere else. Logical, right? :/

The rest of my books are in similar shambles. I've bought dozens of new books this year, way more than in any other year, so I quickly ran out of space. Combined with the annoying fact that my shelves are all different heights, meaning that I can only fit certain books on certain shelves, organisation is limited. I have all my green and orange penguins together, and all of the books that I've bought new (rather than second hand) are also bundled together. My vintage editions also get their own shelf. But apart from that, they are basically chucked on the shelves in the order that I bought them.

I tell myself I will organise my books properly when I stop buying them. Haha, like that is ever going to happen!

[Ellen Lee]

I don't arrange them in any way at all. Although, I do reserve one shelf for just series books, and another shelf for books that I really, really enjoyed. And I have one shelf just dedicated to books that I own but have yet to read. And for the books that I read but didn't really think were very good, I just stick 'em at the back and arrange books that I liked better in front of them.

[Rachel Joy Bernatowicz]

Shelf 1: my Hunger Games display because I loved those books so much.

Shelf 2: Other dystopian books, books based on mythology, historical fiction, and my 7th grade social studies textbook.

Shelf 3: More historical fiction, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, realistic fiction, and John Green books.

Shelf 4: Adventure/fantasy and more historical fiction.

Shelf 5: More realistic fiction, assorted other, and nonfiction.

[Marie Z]

I have three broad categories: Hardcover, Paperback and Textbooks/Yearbooks.

The yearbooks and hardcovers go together arranged by height.

Paperbacks start on the next shelf and take up the rest of my built-in bookcase also arranged by height - but also by author because those generally happen to be the same height (especially when they use the same publisher each time).

Textbook storage is more lax than the rest. Some are nicely placed in some crates serving as bookshelves and the others are in a pile in my rented room here at school (note: most of my books are at my parents' house)

Series of books must be in the same binding as the first one I buy of that series (Ex. I bought The Alchemist of the Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series in hardcover, therefore the rest must also be in hardcover.) This rule is annoying when collecting paperbacks since books in the US always come out hardcover first and you have to wait at least a year for the paperback....

[Michelle Teoh]

Well, on the first level of my shelf, there are the books who have black covers. (Twilight [13-year-old phase, plus, I can't actually throw them away, can I?], Vampire Diaries, Vampire Academy etc)

I have the trilogies/series on the second level: The Mortal Instruments, Divergent, The Hunger Games, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings.

On the third level, I have books which are...um...shorter/standard novel sized. Eg. Jodi Picoult books, Southern Vampire series, Alice Sebold books, Nicholas Sparks books etc)

Fantasy novels are on the fourth level: Inkheart trilogy, The Inheritance Cycle series, His Dark Materials trilogy and Dianna Wynne Jones books.

On the last level, I have the classics like The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights etc.

[Liam]

I used to have all my books organised by genre, author, and series. I moved house, and my entire family's books are either in bookshelves, but not organised beyond non-fiction or fiction, or in piles. I have books all over my desk, in piles on the floor, in shelves that weren't meant for them, on my bedside table, and on my bookshelf.

 

I'm going to organise them next summer. I will. I won't put it off. (Even if I'll probably forget.)