How I'm Organising My Bookshelves

Note: I was going to share a post about The Leeds Library today, but I wanted to film a video to go with it, showing you my library book haul.

Unfortunately, I’ve got conjunctivitis (I think triggered by the sawdust when my latest bookcases were being fitted on Monday), so my left eye is red and sore, and I can’t wear my contact lenses or make-up.

In short, I look far from my best, and would rather not appear on camera until my eye has cleared up! So that post will be coming asap, but in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this insight into my shelving system…

How I organise my substantial book collection is a question I’ve been asked many times over the years, and for the most part ‘wherever they’ll fit’ has been the answer.

To a certain extent, this still runs true. In an ideal world, all my books would be categorised as to genre and arranged alphabetically, but as anyone without entirely uniform shelving realises, this isn’t an ideal world.

Up to a point, how I arrange books is determined by the varying shelving sizes of my bookcases, with oversized books fitting at the bottom and smaller volumes slotting in along the narrower tops. As I always want bookshelves with the most number of shelves as possible, the height of the shelves varies. This can cause a few headaches, as books by one author often vary in size (especially if I have some as hardback editions and some as paperbacks), so it’s often not possible to keep whole collections of a single author’s work together.

People are often surprised that I don’t have trouble knowing what books I have and where they are (once I’m used to my new shelves, at least!), and that I don’t find the need to catalogue them (I’m not, after all, a library, and as long as I know where my books are and what I have, I don’t see the point in such a tedious, time-consuming task). I have a pretty good memory, and my Mum has an almost photographic memory, so we tend to just know where a book is because we can picture exactly where it is on a shelf.

Over the years, though, I’ve also developed a way of organising books that works best for me, and I’m looking forward to being able to organise my collection much better in this new house, where I’ve decided to invest in having custom-built shelving, so I can maximise wall space as much as possible for my books.