I got rid of lots of books when I moved a year and change ago, culling down to enough to fill one Ikea Billy bookcase about 3/4 full. I don't buy books I haven't read now, preferring to borrow books from the library and only purchase the ones I want to reread and/or lend out.
The books I am currently reading (owned/borrowed & library all), the fancy notebooks I am currently in process of filling, and the books I most want to discuss with people on the shelf at my eye level (second from the top).
Large textbooks, dictionaries, and coffee table books go on the bottom shelf so the bookcase doesn't fall over.
Books are ordered in decreasing size from left to right within each shelf, and roughly in decreasing size from top to bottom, with the aforementioned exception shelves.
In my last apartment I organised my books by colour and it was beautiful and I could always find them, and then I only put things down on my shelves in front of the matching colour section of books, so I could also always find all my things.
I...do not know how I'd reduce my books to one bookcase, quite honestly. I'm having a hard time even imagining it.
But I do love the IDEA of color-coded book systems, and I'm so deeply tempted on a regular basis. I just suspect that a) I'd never find anything again, and b) S would kill me in my sleep if I were to start rearranging them in a visual-spatial order.
We have an interim system! It's just like a system, except for how it's not done and I think there must be a better way and also last night I spent 15 minutes looking for a statistical analysis book that turned out not even to be in the same ROOM that I thought it was.
Also, I seem to have misplaced all of the source materials for my Yuletide fic, so I'm back to only having the original language version in my computer to work from. So glad I ordered translation materials last month that I never even had time to finish reading. Awesome job, brain.
When last I had bookshelves, I went with color-coding for my fiction. But generally I organize all media by association, which drives everyone not-me batty. Currently all my books are in the basement except for a single shelf, double-stacked, where by "by association" I mean Viper Pilot is next to You're Stepping On My Cloak And Dagger (both hilarious service-related irreverent memoirs) which is next to Air Spy (both about WWII espionage).
100% of the people who have an opinion hate my organizational structure, but it makes the most sense for me when browsing. It's like if call numbers hadn't been assigned by someone on the bad drugs (or at east whose inner logic makes no sense to me at all, sheesh).
Your organizational book structure sounds EXACTLY like our dvd organization. It has a pattern, and things that are related segue nicely, and it is completely and utterly incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't sitting in the room when we did it. Which means that basically the people who can use it are me, Shannon, and Shelly.
I'm not sure it would work with our books, though. There's probably an upper limit on the sheer amount of media a setup like that can carry. Still, when it comes to the non-fiction, we gave it a try.
Yeah, I think it generally works better for non-fiction than fiction. Though it might be fun to try on fiction... but yeah, I've done that by color for simplicity.
I suspect that if I were to organize all of our fiction that way, convenient is not the word that S would use. I'm tempted to do it anyway, though. *g*
It funny how many of us seem to assume that the author is what matter for fiction, but the subject matters for non-fiction. Is that inherent to our brains, or have we all been trained by too many years of library organization to think it's a natural division?
(Which is...not related to my original reason for asking the question. But it's a more interesting question that now I want the answer to. Oops.)
I have no idea how to test it; it would require finding some group of people who have never seen or visited anything that uses that organizational system. So no bookstores, libraries, or visits to other people who organize that way? Or maybe it would be possible to get some sort of tendency measure, and plot it against cumulative time spent in one of those places
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The books I am currently reading (owned/borrowed & library all), the fancy notebooks I am currently in process of filling, and the books I most want to discuss with people on the shelf at my eye level (second from the top).
Large textbooks, dictionaries, and coffee table books go on the bottom shelf so the bookcase doesn't fall over.
Books are ordered in decreasing size from left to right within each shelf, and roughly in decreasing size from top to bottom, with the aforementioned exception shelves.
In my last apartment I organised my books by colour and it was beautiful and I could always find them, and then I only put things down on my shelves in front of the matching colour section of books, so I could also always find all my things.
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But I do love the IDEA of color-coded book systems, and I'm so deeply tempted on a regular basis. I just suspect that a) I'd never find anything again, and b) S would kill me in my sleep if I were to start rearranging them in a visual-spatial order.
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Also, I seem to have misplaced all of the source materials for my Yuletide fic, so I'm back to only having the original language version in my computer to work from. So glad I ordered translation materials last month that I never even had time to finish reading. Awesome job, brain.
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100% of the people who have an opinion hate my organizational structure, but it makes the most sense for me when browsing. It's like if call numbers hadn't been assigned by someone on the bad drugs (or at east whose inner logic makes no sense to me at all, sheesh).
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I'm not sure it would work with our books, though. There's probably an upper limit on the sheer amount of media a setup like that can carry. Still, when it comes to the non-fiction, we gave it a try.
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(The comment has been removed)
(Which is...not related to my original reason for asking the question. But it's a more interesting question that now I want the answer to. Oops.)
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(The comment has been removed)
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