Organising your books
31 January 2009
Whether you are a reader or an author, we all have houses filled with books. Some are piled, some are in tubs under the bed, some take pride of place on the bookshelf. But the question is, how do you organise your bookshelf?
We all may have seen this now quite famous picture (left), credited to 
Flickr user Chodta, showing beautifully rainbow colour-coded shelves behind a nice white couch.
Why not organise your books by colour!
In fact there is a whole group on Flickr purely for rainbow bookshelves photos. Even libraries have given it a go (right), with their romance books.
How do you organise your books?
Jules
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Australian Romance Readers Association 
I have a HP iPaq PPC 210.This is more expensive of the newer ones. There is a 110 or 112 (the numbers vary according to where you buy them and many time?)This one has a higher resolution screen. Great for reading and playing Sudoku. I play a fruit version and a flower version. No boring numbers for me 🙂It’s my diary, photo album, library, star chart, rail time table, calculator, games machine and more. I can use the net with wifi and I could play mp3s if I wanted too. I love it almost as much as my husband. 🙂 Laine
Laine, What type of PDA do you have? I’ve been looking at buying one purely for ebook reading. I love the thought of taking my entire library with me too! Hard to think of how many boxes I;d need to bring 3000 books though! Me thinks I am having ebook envy 😦
I read ebooks on my pda. In 2006 I organised by genre. An sd card each for romance, sff and crime and mystery. But that was too much card swapping and I had to carry the extra cards. So I now I get a new card each year.I could get the whole collection on one card but it slows down finding the book I want. An sd card isn’t as pretty as a colour coordinated bookshelf but I will be bringing my library of more than 3,000 ebooks to Melbourne with me. Try doing that with paper. 🙂Laine
I DO organize mine by color! Inspired by these photos. Well, and by a friend whose very simple apartment is gorgeous because she sneaks rainbows in everywhere. I started out by donating a ton of books to the little bookshelf for the queer youth group I co-facilitate at work, and then thought “If they’re all haphazard and unorganized anyway, why not put them in rainbow order?” It’s like a super-cheap rainbow flag for the room 🙂 And then I missed the pretty rainbows when I was at home so I have begun slowly putting each of my bookshelves in rainbow order. Last to go is a series of four bookcases in a corner of the living room which I hope to make into one BIG rainbow.
lol I’m coloured coded as well, that is, with Harlequin books. The others, a collection of, Nora Roberts, Danielle Steel, Sydney Sheldon, Shirley Conran, and the many hundred of various authors. My TBR pile is gradually getting down. But there are so many good books out there.Suz 🙂
I have mine by author and a seperate bookshelf for TBR pile but that is getting so big everything is getting doubled up need to have more time to read.Have FunHelen S
Being a library organisational freak, I have to have mine organised by authors and then chronolically within each. Most of them in the bookcases are rom of various sub-genres. I separate my TBR pile, they have an unsorted bookcase all of their own. And in my lovely antique family heirloom, my-granda-built-it book case I have my prized collection of a certain author’s signed books both OOP paperbacks and 1st ed hard backs, organised chronologically. 🙂
the OCD in me demand I organise mine by author, then chronological order 🙂 I also group mine in genre, so I have all categories together that graduate from sweet to extra hot; the P/F/F/TT go together, the womens fiction together, as well as the historicals, rom com. Then we get hardcore with Dean Koontz and Laurel K 😀
Haphazardly. 🙂 Colour-coding would work with category romances, I imagine. (I used to keep mine in numerical order, back when I was a regular HQN buyer.) Now I shelve my (mostly standalone) books by author, from favouritest to maybes.