how do you catalogue /organize your books?

Now it's a complete mess, partly due to Matt removing about two shelves worth from the middle of this careful system and putting them in the bedroom to make room for some other stuff. Arrgh! I mean, moving stuff from either END, maybe, but the middle??

We now have a little shelf by the bed too which currently houses mainly Matt's books and some crosswords, but I feel would be much better used as a poetry shelf, so I can just reach out for my old favourites during the night...

Hallway: Fiction paperbacks, plus travel literature (not guides). Bottom shelf, Cathryn's Killy Cooper novels which are slowly disappearing into the loft.

Lounge has hardback fiction, hardback travel literature, all travel guides, art, architecture & design , Reference (note to self, Reference is spilling over onto shelf below), history, local history, old editions and nice editions, sets etc. Atlases / encyclopedias. Cookery has its own case.

Disorganised and dominating the flat, basically.

A lot of this is theory rather than practice, though.

We have ideas for when we do move. An alcove of books no less.

Weirdly, and I suspect this applies to a lot of people on these boards, if we split up I could identify 99% of my own books out of the jumble.

Economical it ain't.

Funny enough, I don't really miss them. I have bought some of them again, but not that many. New monkey, new books, I say.

I have two sets like this. The one open to the public consists of what I've read, like some sort of geek trophy case. The other one, which grows faster, is all the books I've bought I've yet to read. That's in the bedroom, ostensibly to guilt me into reading instead of buying additions.

I have a stamp. "This TOME is _______."

I don't get it, but i think you should be the first guest at my "cup and a nap".

Toddlers often mistake mine for bad - but then they grow up to be either rich people (mine-good) or poor people (not mine -bad).
My favorite self pitying dirge (these days) is "Persuasion" by Richard and Teddy Thompson.

Dirty boy, Martin ;)

The sunken bookshelf opposite the sofa (to me, the equivalent of artwork on the wall) holds all of my Latvian books, the Modern Library books, and some other hardcovers I have recently loved.

The big brown bookshelf on the back wall holds the favorites: Murakami, Pelevin, Mitchell, McEwan, Tolstoy.

The bookshelf by the front door holds a mish-mash of read and unread, but all much-loved authors (Coe, Gogol, Chekhov, Magnus Mills) or authors I suspect I might like (Llaxness, Mailer).

The bookshelf behind the door holds the odd books, the ones I like to keep but have no current use for (including Winnie the Pooh in Russian and a big book about giving birth).

The bookshelf near the kitchen holds dictionaries, language books, and some art books.

Cookbooks in the kitchen.

Mass market in the bedroom (because of a particularly low odd shaped bookshelf that will only hold mass market books when stacked vertically).

Bedside table holds favorite collections of short stories: Nabokov, O'Connor, Carver.

I could never alphabetize: too impersonal. The placement of books around me has to be fluid. Even what I've listed above would change depending on where I lived, or what bookshelf I find on the curb or in the back of my parents' garage.

(This is apparently a really old post, but I couldn't resist sharing. I love the idea of how your books surround you.)

Categories: Poetry, fiction, reference, random/philosophy/biography/journalism, travel, art, comix. Cookery is in the kitchen. There is no genre ghettoisation within the fiction section, as separation would make it clear just how geeky our literary tastes are.

Spare room: dictionaries, furrin grammar reference books and old textbooks, by language and more or less by size so they don't fall over. Variety of A-Zs, no particular order.

Bedroom: Pile by bed of current reads.

i just reorganized all my books alphabetically by publisher

they look great, too--all the penguins and cambridge philosophy texts ive gotten for school lined up next to each other, each the same size with the same color spine

almost all the books i have by vintage--and i have a lot, more than from any other publisher (due in no small part to philip k dick)--are the exact same size! the only two that aren't are the big ulysses and a copy of pamuk's snow that i got in italy

sorry, not snow, but rather henning mankell's "one step behind"

I make vague groupings that cluster according to perceived affinities. Some are obvious (i.e. 20th century American poetry or ancient Greek and Roman poetry) and others not-so-obvious (i.e. books I might not keep).

one side of the shelf is comics (ie trades & gns, the floppy stuff is in boxes), the other side is booky-books.

gf & i split shelf down the middle. because the shelf is unstable, the heavy stuff (read: philosophy textbooks, giant GUIDE TO x) goes on the bottom, the lighter stuff (pocket editions etc) on top

Fiction takes up one room, alphabetically by author, otherwise I'd never find anything.
Poetry and plays by author in another room.
Non-fiction in disorganised piles and numerous moving-house boxes still from several years ago.
Art books crammed in wherever they'll fit.

I reorganized within categories by height/shape recently, and it made for a nicer looking room.

That said, now that I'm off to grad school, I need to start organizing things into TAKE/STORE/GIVE/SELL piles, I guess!

You go to Grad School, Kris? Was there a thread about this?

Oh, yes, it's why I revived the Cas in Canada thread a little while back. I'm off to Toronto!

i keep them organized by size and color these days. mass market paperbacks go together, large art books go together, etc. it makes everything a little more aesthetically pleasing, natch.

^^ this is important to me, too. i like the way my shelf looks (i have one, quickly filling up since i got here 7mo ago): unread books generally at the top, magazines (special art mags like FMR and high fructose and some other odd ones that i only have because they feature interviews with ray caesar), big pretty special books (mostly photography and art) in the middle, all other fiction grouped by author but not alphabetised.

Bookshelf 1

Shelves 1 and 2:Granta, anthologies and Harry Potter (numerical order)
Shelf 3: 'Classic' Fiction (organised by approximate date of first publishing)
Shelf 4: Non-fiotion (smaller books) - music, teaching, religion, maps and miscellaneous history, complete works of Shakespeare, Burns, lit. notes, French and English style and grammar guides, thesauri etc.
Shelf 5: Non-fiction (larger books) - Gray's anatomy, Monty Python scripts, Music history (rather a lot!), teaching, politics, dictionaries.
Shelf 6: Oversize (atlases, Far Side Gallery etc)

Bookshelf 2

Top shelf: Books to read (piled about 8 high)
Next shelf: Chris Brookmyre and others arranged by height and author (and miniature scores)
Shelf 3: Assorted modern fiction
Shelf 4: Books that don't seem to fit anywhere else
Shelf 5: Piano music - Major Works (Beethoven and Mozart sonatas, Chopin Waltzes and Muzurkas etc).

Cookery books are (of course!) separate.
The rest of my music's separate too (vocal scores, scores for musicals, light opera, organ and clarinet music, songbooks) in huge boxes scattered around the place.

....knew I had this somewhere.

Quote from Anne F. Garréta's "On Bookshelves", from McSweeney's 22 - The State of Constraint (New Work by Oulipo) - regarding how we sort out books.

She proposes fluid cataloguing based on one's personal experience with the book. For example:

"...-books in which one remembers having encountered at least once the word 'book'
-books that left no memory of having contained the word 'book'."

or

"...-books in which one encounters whales
-books in which not even the shadow of a whale is to be found
-books from which have disappeared, inexplicably, the trace of whales one imagined there."

These seems to be fairly light hearted, but one that caught my eye was...

"...-books given to you by someone you love, or have loved
-books you talked about with someone you loved.."

which led me to wonder about cataloguing them by how likely you would be to recommend them to a friend. Garréta does point out, however, that only the person who sorted the books would ever be able to find what they wanted if the collection was big enough...

One thing I do like about alphabetical order, boring though it may be, is that you get some odd disparities in the way totally different authors set up next to each other. A friend who doesn't have many books thus has Spike Milligan and George Orwell side by side.

Hardbacks and oversized paperbacks (airport exclusives, for example) bottom shelves
mass market paperbacks top shelves (you know, the really tiny sized paperbacks that tend to fall apart if read without due care and attention)
everything else in random order, wherever I can find space, except:

books waiting to be reviewed - under my desk
books waiting to be read for *pleasure* (i.e. I'm not being paid to read them) - in the bathroom

That said, I'm running out of shelf space now - I've started to put the tiny paperbacks in front of the hardbacks, which I don;t really like. But then, I'm anal about these things. Possibly time for either a clearout, or to buy a new bookshelf. The latter makes more sense, because I'm not sure I can find space for a bookshelf without throwing out other stuff, like children's toys...

I stack them in piles and then knock them over and curse myself out for being such a klutz...

I just split them up into 'read' and 'unread', which I haven't decided yet if it was depressing or merely enervating

books from which have disappeared, inexplicably, the trace of whales one imagined there.

Sounds like Adair's translation of Perec's La Disparition. It contains a plot summary of Moby Dick, but the word "whale" is off-limits, so Adair had to use the annoying word "grampus" several times, as well as "fish".

My custom: first, by size, with smaller ones above, larger ones below, otherwise the shelves appear ready to fall over. Then, separation of fiction from nonfiction, then topic. Simple, easy.