PROS:
1. Your bookshelves will be truly and undeniably beautiful. (See image).
2. The process of color-coding your bookshelves will take many enjoyable hours, in which you will find yourself faced with questions that are at once banal and delightful. Will you employ a ROY G BIV scheme? If so, where will you put your black books? Your white books? Your beige? Do the bright orange-spined Penguins look best clumped together or evenly-
distributed throughout the orange section? Will you ever get to ask Jeanette Winterson how she feels about Written on the Body being sandwiched between The Marx-Engels Reader and Sula? (Because you think she’d like it).
3. You will learn important life lessons. For example, a book that is both red and blue may be placed successfully in either the red or blue section, and look as if ’twas ever thus.
4. You may concede all life-altering decisions to the tyranny of your color-coding. For example, merging your book collection with your boyfriend’s upon moving in together does not have to be a (terrifying and/or exhilarating) decision at all. All books in the apartment must submit to the color-coding law of the apartment, which insists that you shall have no other methods of organization, including organization by partner, before it.
5. New guests will remark upon your bookshelves immediately upon entering your apartment and will be too blinded by their beauty to notice your apartment’s dust bunnies, its overflowing dish rack, and the fact that not a single picture on your walls (and there are a lot of them) is hung evenly. You will no longer have to joke awkwardly that you hung them that way “on purpose to cultivate a Gertrude Stein salon aesthetic” when the truth is that you just have negative interest in using a level.
6. Every time you look at your bookshelves you will be assured that you are a good person because have brought real beauty into the world.
CONS:
1. You will never find your books again, because even though you may know the color of all of your books’ covers, you will certainly not know the color of all of their spines. And what they haven’t told you in your several publishing jobs, or in your PhD program in English, is that contrary to popular belief, a book’s cover often doesn’t match its spine.
2. The fact that you have not figured this out for yourself earlier is shameful, and you will find yourself dwelling on this while endlessly scanning your shelves every time you need a book, which is a lot, because you’re supposed to be writing your dissertation, but instead you are looking for your books.
3. You will be forced to articulate this particular shame every time a new guest appears in your apartment, because all new guests inevitably ask: “but how do you find your books?” You will refer them to the large “BE CALM” Louise Bourgeois print unevenly hung on your wall; this print is recommended for all color-coders.
4. You will expose your relationship to the possibility of your personal nightmare, which is the book-dividing break-up scene in Annie Hall, except in your life, all of the poetry books AND all of the books on death and dying are yours. You will think that your relationship will last, but you will always write your name in your books, just in case, and you will have to live with the fact that you are this type of person.
5. Your color-coded bookshelves will need constant attention. Every new book demands reorganization, and each reorganization is exponentially less fun than the one before it.
6. You will eventually have too many books and not enough apartment to continue color-coding. You will fight, but you will not win. First, you will buy new skinny bookcases from Bed Bath and Beyond to flank the TV in the living room. Then, some IKEA Expedits will appear in the bedroom, and encircle the dresser. Then, the Billys will come to surround the bed. The beautiful rainbow bookcases will still be in the living room, for the viewing pleasure of guests, but the bedroom will be filled with the leftovers—the many library books, your boyfriend’s endless art magazines, books that have been discolored by the sun, the stark white teaching editions of Shakespeare, his books about health problems, the books you are ashamed to own up to having read (some of them about health problems), the beige books that do not fit into either the black and white or the rainbow bookcases.
Eventually, you will begin to think that you should implement a sub-organizational system by reducing book repeats—by moving one of the books that you have two copies of to the bedroom. Your guests only need one color-coded copy of The Postmodern Condition to find you annoying, one copy of The Corrections to find you insufferable, only one copy of Catch-22 to know that you were once a precocious teenager.
But how could you decide whose to leave and whose to move? Your oatmeal hardcover On Beauty and his deep red paperback copy of the same, your strikingly ugly copy of Mrs. Dalloway, his somewhat less ugly Mrs. Dalloway—these books he read and loved (or read and pretended to love), because you asked him to read them and to love them.
7. Your sub-organizational system, and all other possible subsystems will fail along with your original color-coding system. You will settle for a beautiful, color-coded living room that holds the books that you both have both of. Know that this is your expression of love. You will settle for faded and beige books, ill-looking and ill-tempered, in the bedroom, watching both of you while you sleep. Know that this is also your expression of love. Submit to the tyranny of your schemes, and then, don’t do it any longer.
Tags: a gertrude stein salon aesthetic, books, bringing beauty into the world, color-coding, jacquelyn ardam, organization
I wanted to try this, but my book collection doesn’t have nearly enough color variation. 🙁 I don’t know what that says about me and my reading habits.
Side note: my boyfriend and I actually had a lot of fun deciding how to organize our merged DVD collection. We made up a lot of Netflix-style extremely specific genre names.
Currently our DVD collection lives all jumbled up, stacks in front of other stacks, with no organization whatsoever. But our plan is to someday organize (when we have real shelf space) according to release date.
!!!
my color-coded bookshelf once included two whole shelves of “sun-damage beige” but now i don’t have the space to do it properly anymore.
I organize my books by favorites, so the least favorites are nearest the kitty litter boxes. Kids books are on the back so people don’t realize that I’ve never grown up.
And now I want to reread the book about Norwegian children sledding their country’s gold away from the Nazis.
That book about Norwegian kids sounds great, do you remember what it’s called?
Snow Treasure!
Yep! It’s a great winter read!
With the measles epidemic! I loved that book a million million, because the adults were like “Oh yeah, let’s just have the kids do this.”
And the gold cave! And I remember there being lots of descriptions of goose-stepping.
Uuuuuuugggghhhjjjjhhhhhhh this post is about me .
What a perfect place to showcase the new word I invented: shelfie. Use it!
http://bookshelfies.tumblr.com/ is this yours?! I was on it, with a pic of my color-coded bookshelf!! Synergy!
I knew it was too good to be an original idea! goddammit.
I’ll always have “dudoir” (dude + boudoir) though!
(I’m not going to Google that and see if it was in, like, a NYT Style piece or something. Just let me have this one.)
No, I don’t think it was, or if it was, I missed it. It’s all yours! Run with it! Email the Sunday Styles with a scoop! make it happen!
Color-coded bookshelves don’t make sense to me. If you have a really big collection, then it’s impossible to easily find what you need. I divide my non-fiction books by subject and then author name and fiction by author’s name. And I think my bookshelves look pretty even if they don’t resemble a rainbow.
Related: artfully cramming books into a fireplace
My bookshelves are organized the same way, but fiction is subdivided into genres (which are not alphabetical, which irks me unreasonably).
::High five from someone who has also decorated fireplaces, kitchen cabinets, and every other space in the house with books::
Or you could electronically catalog all your books and include their shelf location in their record and then just look things up (which is what I would do if I were to shelve my books this way, but I don’t think that I will be doing that)
That picture alone gives me hives. I can barely handle the Barnes & Noble shelving “system” much less a rainbow theme. Give me LOC or give me death!
Wait…do you arrange your personal bookshelves by LC call numbers? Because that would be impressive
Generally speaking–H business, Z typography, that kind of thing. But within each larger category I alphabetize by author’s last name (then date of publication). So it’s not strict and doesn’t involve cutter numbers (ain’t nobody got time for that) but I need to have all my American History together, poetry together, etc and roughly in the same order as the LC classifications.
I arranged my books by LOC call numbers a couple of years ago, but eventually got lazy about maintaining the right order (and ran out of shelf space…).
Other problem: book height vs shelf height. LoC meant that I had at least one tall book on every shelf, which tended to mean that I’d end up with one shelf that doesn’t have enough height for any books unless you put them on their sides.
I remain furious about the design of the IKEA Billy bookcases because the holes for the little pegs you move are not where I want them to be. As a result, my attempts to change shelf heights often leave me with a shelf that is just one or two millimeters too short for a mass market paperback.
I worked at a university library for two years, and now anytime I encounter a classification system other than LOC it confuses the hell out of me. I will also totally judge if the book rows are messy, or there’s a large group out of order. Do your pick-up routinely, other libraries!
B&N shelves by subject, then author. Subjects are determined by sales/marketing, industrial organizers and psychologists. Totally different beast.
I couldn’t do this because my memory is nowhere near photographic. It isn’t even close to daguerreotypical. I can remember long strings of numbers but I’m awful with faces and images of all sorts. I could see myself Google image-searching a book title, scrolling through pages of book covers to find the weird old mass-market paperback edition I bought at a library book sale years ago. And then realizing the spine must’ve been a different color, and then despairing because I still can’t find it.
To ward off this portrait of madness, I arrange by novels, then short stories, then drama, then poetry, then anthologies, then non-fiction by subject, then foreign language books (mostly trashy novels in German).
because i can spot a harry potter spine from 500 yards, i will let you all know that it makes me cringe to have a series broken up, like they are here.
Honestly that was one of the biggest reasons I only sort of color coded mine. I couldn’t split up a series!
That was my first thought! “My Harry Potter books all have different spine colors!” And I want all of my Madeline L’Engle books together.
YEP that’s the problem. The first things I think of when I see shelves like this are Series of Unfortunate Events and Death Note… parted from each other! My previous edition Queen of Attolia (beige spine) separated from the current editions of the rest of the series (black spine)! No, this will never do.
Ha, mine is by color EXCEPT Harry Potter. we have a bunch of those narrow Ikea bookshelves everyone seems to use to make fake built-ins (Pax?) and the whole series fits comfortably on a shelf all by themselves. Harry deserves a little extra respect. Harry canNOT be separated by color!
I do love how it looks. If we move (we will never move) I would reshelve by color for the fun of it. But our books are organized on geological lines, sedimentary layer upon sedimentary layer. Or, they were, but then my niece slept in the study for several weeks and was compelled to sort them by author, and now I can’t find anything.
NOoOOoOoOOoooo! Color-coded bookshelves are terrible. TERRIBLE. Unless all of your books have white/beige/grey/black spines and they are not organized by spine color.
Book shelf triptych
1. My husband and I had an actual fight about how to arrange our bookshelves. He wanted tallest to shortest on each shelf, and I wanted alphabetical by genre/subject. We compromised: tallest to shortest by genre, with as much alphabetization as possible.
2. As someone who has written a dissertation, I can say that I had all my books arranged by related chapter and divided by primary and secondary materials, because I am a little obsessive sometimes, and it still took me an eon and a half to write the thing (well, ok, 2 1/2 years, but do we get to minus one year for the divorce I talked about on that other post today? I think yes. So in this math one eon=one year. Divorce not related to the above bookshelf fight).
3. And then there was the time during the dissertation process when my bf thought he was being helpful by rearranging my shelves into books I owned and books that were from the library…heroically, I did not cry!
Regarding #3: You did not cry, but did you murder him?
I did not! And actually we are still together. See? People can overcome GREAT OBSTACLES and become better, more selfless, saint-style individuals.
WHY WOULD A PERSON EVER REARRANGE SOMEONE ELSES BOOKS
it is clearly a sign of some deeper issue with personal space and boundaries. this is so disturbing to me.
I think he genuinely thought he was helping. He has a very strong tidying/organizing impulse and he rearranges his own stuff all the time. I don’t think he understood why I had shelved library books in with my own books–a thing I guess non-grad-students or people who don’t do long-term research projects probably don’t do? I had some of those books for months and months and months and they were full of post-its, etc., but I don’t think that really occurred to him at the time.
Also, we hadn’t been dating very long and now he knows to NEVEREVEREVER do it again. Hah, when I moved a few months later he just pulled the books out of their boxes and put them on the floor for me to deal with. 🙂
My husband once asked me of there were any books I’d be comfortable taking to the charity shop so we could have space for new books and I could. not. find. one. Awkward.
I have had this conversation in the past too! Until I was forced to because I was trying to compress a 2-bedroom house into one bedroom, I never was able to get rid of any books ever. Now I am a bit more relaxed about it. But also, I’ve started buying lots of ebooks! A super tiny place to put loads of new books, god it’s like magic! ::exults in a ring of nooks:: Also, it helps me to figure out which new books I love enough to buy hard copies of.
Yah, and also now no-one can tell which ones are my porn.
I did this! My biggest problem is the books where the spine is seriously multicolored. That means I have three bookshelves of perfect color gradient and one bookshelf that’s basically the Island of Misfit Toys.
yep, this is me! to confuse the issue even more, some of mine are shelved in horizontal stacks to save space, and it looks even prettier. I have one overflow bookshelf that has doors to hide all the weirdly tall/textbook/ugly books in, and one overflow that has the prettiest, most favouritest books in it, organized by hmmm… “looks” I guess. not strictly colour-based, but more how they “go together”. this is a terrible, beautiful system, and honestly I don’t mind having to look a bit harder to find something, because then I see a bunch of books that I had forgotten about!
I always feel so inadequate when the topic of bookshelf-organization comes up, as my books are organized…by nothing.* They are randomly and haphazardly shoved in wherever they fit. Authors, hell, even series are on opposite sides of the room from each other.** I have a good visual memory, so if I remember where I saw the book last, I can usually find it, but that certainly doesn’t always work. This usually leads to ten minutes of cursing and almost-tears until I find whatever book I was looking for, and then I SWEAR that I will organize my books RIGHT NOW. Or…when I’m done reading this book I just found.
*As I have what I almost completely certain is undiagnosed OCD (of the checking and doubting sort) this just once again goes to show that superorganized! and obsessivecompulsive! are not the same thing at allll.
**I do have two shelves that are (somewhat) organized. One is all Discworld, the other is Vidal and Vonnegut.
This is my whole family. It leads to things like “don’t you have The Crucible from when you were in 8th grade?” “No I can’t find it.” “okay, fine, I’ll buy it for your brother” (10 days later) “do you still need The Crucible? I just found it.” “No.” “Okay, but don’t we have Hamlet? I need Hamlet.” “I’ll find it.” (10 minutes later) “I have Tempest and Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar.” “I need Hamlet.” “Text Dad and see if he has it at work.” (2 minutes later) “He has it but he’s already left and I need it tomorrow.” “will they let you use an electronic version?” “No” “Your brother gets to use an electronic version of The Crucible” “Well I can’t.” “Okay, I think this B&N gift card still has some value on it, go buy Hamlet, then.”
Of course, Tempest and Julius Caesar were in the same room, on different shelves, and Romeo & Juliet were in another room entirely.
(Regarding your * – I can guarantee you that you are not alone in combining those attributes!)
I expect a full scale shelf-organization war to erupt in these comments and I will be very disappointed if I don’t get my wish.
This will always mystify me. I find the visual cacophony of my alphabetical arrangement charming.
This is madness. My books are shelved by subject. Different rooms/bookcases have different subjects. The kitchen/breakfast room has a bookcase of cookbooks. The living room has books about the Southwest and Southwestern cookbooks. My bedroom has my favorite fiction. My studio has my sewing and art books. My office has nonfiction and history…you get the idea. None are arranged by color. However, poltergeists and husband have been known to put books in the wrong places. This makes it a challenge to find Plutarch or Jessica Mitford or Harry Potter when one needs them. Writing this makes me realize that there are too many books in this house.
I cannot, cannot, cannot find a way in which the Rainbow Array would ever, ever, ever work for my books. Genre, era, author, how much I like it–these are all acceptable organizational schemes. I am currently trying to think of the spine color of my most-referenced books and I have no idea at all.
My main sorting challenge has been how to deal with the various editions of Shakespeare. Do I shelve all the Hamlets together, or do I put all the Penguins/Ardens/Bedfords together? And what the hell do I do with those stupid Bantams that have, like four plays in a single volume? (Answer: I should get rid of the Bantams.) Also, all the Shx lives separate from the rest of my Early Modern drama, which makes me feel like a snob but is the most functional. (I love you best, John Webster!)
I have dealt with the multiple copies of one book issue, and it’s tricky! In the past I’ve done a Shakespeare section with Riverside Shakespeare-type collections at the head, followed by all the Penguins, Ardens, Nortons, etc. together. But that was also in the phase where the Great Bookshelf Compromise necessitated me shelving things of similar height together (see one of my many above comments, because apparently I cannot stop talking about bookshelves today).
Because of an odd bookshelf situation at my work, I had to separate out the completes from the individual plays, which is fine but I hate that the paperback completes (Pelican, new so-pretty RSC) won’t stand up on their own and have to bracketed by hardbacks. I think a lot about my play situation because I sit and look at them all day.
It is amazing and astonishing how het up people get about this! I think it’s pretty and fun and I find alphabetizing my books just as much a pain in the ass, and don’t see any one system as superior.
(I’m curious about the Official Toast Stance of bookshelf organization, now.)
I couldn’t alphabetize by author anyway, because (HERESY!) half the time I forget who my books are by.
This bookseller finds alphabetizing books to be the most heavenly spiritual balm known to man and will do it for any Toasties who need it 🙂
Our fiction books are by size for maximum space efficiency, and nonfiction are by genre, more or less. The fiction shelves are still entirely full, though, so most of them are double-stacked, which means I can never find anything at all.
“you will always write your name in your books, just in case, and you will have to live with the fact that you are this type of person”
After nine blissful years in a happy relationship, I still do this with my CDs (yes, I still buy CDs and that should tell you something else right there). Someone please tell me I’m not alone.
This is among the most important things I’ve ever read. I have dreamt of having a color coded bookstore all my life: perfect for browsing & aesthetic.
Winter break project!!
The idea of a color organized bookstore made me seize up in terror and long to go curl up in the basement of my shop, rocking and telling myself it’s going to be okay
Sorry Jacquelyn, but *I* live in a post-racial world, and I don’t *see* color, so this doesn’t help me
The only books I have that are organized by anything other than “this fits on this shelf” are my cookbooks, which are currently organized by region, starting in the southeast and moving west. And the big ass reference cookbooks have their own shelf, because somehow we wound up will all of them, including both the original and 10th anniversary editions of How to Cook Everything (which we keep because some of our favorite recipes only live in one or the other).
Mine are mostly by author and sometimes by subject – the ghost stories are all together so they don’t scare the other books (and because quite a lot are from the same collection so they have matchy matchy spines in black with blood spatters). They’re all stacked vertically though, as I moved from a biggish house to a small flat and had no space. I do need to shift a load that I’ve replaced with ebooks though, so my shelves can stop being double stacked and start beign more aesthetically appealing.
I love this article so much I can’t even. As a former publishing industry employee now doing my postgrad in English, they never do tell you that the spines don’t match!
NO I disapprove thoroughly of this practise on aesthetic grounds anyway. Also of furniture made of books. Books are to be placed in a random order on the shelf, so that Anne of Green Gables and Jackie Kay and Claudia Kishi and Phillip Larkin and the weird poet you met at a reading one time can all get to know each other! That’s the whole point!
My manga series used to be arranged in a sort of gradient of tone. No, not color sort of tone–emotional tone. Thus Fruits Basket is somewhat halfway between the unadulterated happiness of Yotsuba&! and the very shounen!1! of Yu-Gi-Oh!.
Current fandom obsessions (it was Death Note at the time) got their own shelf, with merchandise surrounding them. It would be fair to call such a shelf a shrine.
Mine are based on entirely what fits as it seems that no bookshelf is the same height. I still can’t find anything and they’re not as pretty. But it works. I do think this is gorgeous, though.
It was hard enough organizing my shelves by size (because if you keep all the same sizes together you can fit more in, and that is something I sorely need), this will never, ever, ever, happen.
Once a gentleman friend came to stay with me for the weekend and organized my video games alphabetically on the shelf. I was outraged and offended by this so I rearranged them in order from Most Attractive Protagonist to Least Attractive Protagonist. (I believe the original Prince of Persia for the PS2 won the first slot.)
Once a gentleman friend came to stay with me for the weekend and organized my video games alphabetically on the shelf. I was outraged and offended by this so I rearranged them in order from Most Attractive Protagonist to Least Attractive Protagonist. (I believe the original Prince of Persia for the PS2 won the first slot.)
True Event: 80’s Blockbuster: “How To Murder Your Wife” (film) shelved next to “How To Barbecue” (instructional video). Imagine if you picked the wrong video? Dead wife, hamburgers charred on outside/raw on inside.
I arrange mine by the DDS: is it weird?
I once wrote a love sonnet to Cutter numbers. <3 u, Cutterie.
I wrote a dissertation and still organized my books by color because I can remember color better than I can which chapter I used it for (and I was working mostly with photocopies of original sources/documents anyway, as there wasn't much secondary lit on my topic). I think my brain is some weird creature that's a hybrid of synesthesia, OCD, and an eidetic memory.
Definitely not. 😀
I sort my books by topic, then by color; I sort my clothing by color in my closet, and I sort the app icons on my dock by color and then by shape. And I get all woozy if someone returns my 25-pak of Stabilo fineliners with the colors in the wrong order.
I need help.
I did my CDs by color because I had them all on my computer and only used them for car trips, at which time scanning through and picking out random CDs was fine. The organization took two days, and it turns out at least half of all CDs have black or white spines, but it looked nice and was an aesthetic element to the room.
Then I sold 90% of them because really, self, CDs in the 2010s? No.
I organize my books by color, and I get weird reactions from fellow PhD students that suggest they think I can’t REALLY take books seriously if I’ve arranged them like this. But the way my memory works, I am much more likely to be able to find a book by color than by author. I guess I don’t really have that many books whose spines are totally different colors. I really don’t understand people who get upset about other people’s bookcases or smug about their own in comparison. When I used to take notes on paper, I also organized them by color. It’s just the fastest way for me to find something. And bonus: my books look really cool. (But this relates to all kinds of other academic snobbery, like assuming that someone who does anything to create any kind of visual appeal – e.g. wear makeup – is not a serious person, blah blah.)
Its the Huey Decimal System 🙂
Exactly! This decision is killing me.
When I was about 8 years old I once organized my mother’s book shelf by color and was so proud of my project, until she came home and yelled at me and made me put it back. i thought of doing this with my books recently, but just couldn’t stand the thought of mixing up my genre’s. So – today I sorted each shelf (which was already sorted by color) by color. so each shelf has white, yellow, orange, red, black, blue and then green. my book shelves are just a foot or two from the side of my bed and all those mixed up colors looked stressful. now it looks MUCH nicer and calmer and prettier. not as gorgeous as if they were completely color coded but much, better. I did leave one shelf at the top for horizontally stacked books of which I had many by the same author. but i color coded each of those stacks too. the whole thing was fun and really pleasing to do – like a game. and didn’t take more than an hour or so.