Ideas for Organizing Your Bookshelves
These are unprecedented times. As more people stay home for the next few weeks, my team at Juniper Books and I are working safely to continue to ship books to keep everyone entertained and make their homes beautiful.
For the Love of Books: Designing and Curating a Home Library includes a lot of ideas and DIY tips to keep you busy working on your book collection and your bookshelves over the next few weeks.
Below is an excerpt from the book. It is available from independent bookstores and they can definitely use your help these days - click on the link above to order from The Boulder Bookstore or you can order a signed copy from Juniper Books.
Big Decisions:
There are a few decisions to make about how to arrange your books that are good to settle on before you start shelving your books. For example, whether to arrange your books:
Alphabetically by author. For most literary collections, it’s nice to organize the books alphabetically by author so you know where to find Jane Austen or Zadie Smith. For non-fiction and other subjects, this method may not as good of a fit.
Alphabetically or chronologically by title or subject. For histories, biographies and other non-fiction, it probably makes more sense to order these by topic. For example when Thatcher installs a collection of US Presidential biographies, he tries to do so chronologically in order of the Presidential terms.
By Subject. A traditional library organizational plan would be to keep like subjects together so that you can go around the room and say “There’s poetry, there’s classic literature, there are my histories” and so on.
By Color — ROYGBIV. This sounds superficial but it looks really cool to make a rainbow with your books. The books are yours and don’t let anyone tell you this is a silly idea!
By Color — Light to Dark or other Color Plan. I tend to think of bookshelves as being a canvas that goes from big and dark on the bottom to small and light on the top. This doesn’t always work out exactly, but as an operating principle, it offers a way to ground bookshelves with the darker bigger books on the bottom.
By Size Overall on the Shelves. Placing larger books closer to the floor is grounding and it makes them more accessible as well. You can still place horizontal stacks of big books on the upper shelves, we are all for that variety.
By Chronological Order of Publication. For the works of one author, it often makes sense to arrange the books in chronological order of publication. For Ernest Hemingway, you’d start with In Our Time and end with either A Moveable Feast or one of his posthumously published works.
By Chronological Order of Acquisition Date. Another way to arrange books is based on when they came into your life. This approach tells more of your story, where you were and who you were at particular points in your life.
By Publisher. Some publishers have really strong brands and are known for publishing certain types of books. Organizing your books by publisher is related to organizing books by subject if there is a really recognizable theme throughout their work.
Stay tuned for more tips on organizing your book collection and your bookshelves. I also love to see photos before and after you’ve worked on your books - please tag @thatcherwine and @juniperbooks on Instagram!