Sunday Edition

How do you organize your bookshelves? There are all sorts of options: the classic dewey decimal system, by subject, by author, by color...or perhaps you are more of a go-with-the-flow kind of person, letting books organize themselves organically based on what was read last or purchased most recently.

Personally, I love organizing things; I'm not too big on actual cleaning (as V. can attest), but boy do I love to sort and straighten! That's why when we moved from Savannah to Athens last month, I relished the opportunity to upgrade our bookshelves, finally giving ourselves enough shelf space for the piles and piles of books we have been storing under beds and in closets for the last three years. (Side note: moving is the one time when I seriously consider dumping half of our collection and really start regretting Vince's proclivity to any kind of bargain; for example, the time he was at Savannah's public library while they were having a book sale: everything you could fit in a bag for one buck. Needless to say, he walked 2 miles back to our apartment with three outrageously heavy bags loaded down with gems like Whale Nation and Mrs. Shakespeare.)

But back to the subject at hand! So, a few weeks ago we bought these spiffy new Expedit shelves at Ikea--which, as we all know, is an absolute dream store for all of us sorters and straighteners and bargain-lovers, too--to put in our dining room and load up with a good majority of our novels, allowing us to shift our old bookshelves into the study, where we could then put relevant design books (me) and business texts (Vince).

Okay, so we had the space and a basic plan of attack about what was going where. I then had to decide how to organize everything (yay!). While I dream about the spectacular spectacular of bookshelves organized by color, practicality intercepted. I mean, it obviously looks brilliant (see images!) and it's a great idea for organizing your closet (my clothes are indeed organized by color) but if you actually want to find a book, you have to remember the color of its spine. Tricky.

Not to mention my aesthetic concern, which is that so many of our books have white or black covers that the rainbow effect might be dampened. However, while looking for pics of color-coded books to share with ya'll, I stumbled upon someone's genius solution to the black/white quandry:

See, they did colors in columns, putting the black books on the two ends and white books running down the middle. Love! I still hold out hope for doing the "by color" form of organization someday, either when I am really bored one day or perhaps by just putting together a small bookshelf with some of my favorite books with a certain color spine, and letting that fill my need to organize by color.

For now though, I should finish this up and get back to telling you how I actually did decide to organize our books: we went for the old standard--alphabetically by author and broken down by subject (literature, art and design, etc.). While it's not the sexiest solution, it sure does make it easy to find books, and I finally get my dream of having a wall of novels...well more like 6'-0" high by about 12'-0" long, but still-YAY!