Reader Question: How do you organize your book shelf?
You may have seen earlier posts about my bookshelves (here and here). Those will give you an immediate visual of how I organize or don’t. On Kindle, I don’t even try. There was once a time that I was far more vigilant about this than I am now.
My movies enjoy far stricter order than the books that I own, and they take up a lot more space, leaving very little shelf for the books that I do have. Tucked together in milk crates, you’ll find my Robert Jordan collection and other books connected in a similar way. A great deal of what I own are my books from graduate school on film studies and screenwriting. The next group were texts used for research which I wanted to keep.
What is on my shelf are books that I refer to frequently. Literature is packed neatly in boxes and stored. Did I mention that I have a toddler? Well, I do. You see, I packed those books when I moved into the city of Saratoga and have not taken them out of storage yet. The apartment was small, and I had very little room. Works I had not yet read and those needed still stayed. When Katie was born and I needed a bigger place, that didn’t change. Why endanger them to being torn?
That said, I have some fancy leather bound works that stay out. So far, she hasn’t realized they’re books, and hasn’t tried to leaf through them. Besides, there aren’t any pictures, and she really likes board books. Her bookshelf is growing by leaps and bounds. It reminds me of my childhood library, which is so important to one’s growth.
Right now, my daughter owns a short bookcase littered with a few toys to help prop up the books that aren’t quite filling the shelves. At this time, the books rank by size and in no particular order. In her closet, a small shelf holds books that are more fragile for little fingers. These should enjoy longevity in her library being classics. The small set of shelves in her bedroom has Golden Books at the top, board books and others on the middle shelf, and holiday reads at the bottom. She loves her Disney’s My First Halloween Book.
I spend a lot more time curating her library than my own! But recently, I have purchased Good Omens and Neverwhere at the author’s suggestion. There are a few more in my Kindle than in print, because it just makes a lot more sense for me to have them as electronic than paper (space). Trust me on that. I don’t have a room to dedicate to a library, and if I did buy print copies, I’d need one!
Hopefully that gives you a better picture than what I posted earlier with a great deal more context to the reason my shelves may look so spare.