No prizes for guessing how my hours will be spent this Sunday ….. Should I stack them colour-coded, by interest, alphabetical? Decisions, decisions … what a lovely dilemma.
New shelves should have new books, shouldn’t they? Have lots of vouchers actually … Does trading them in count as breaking a book-buying ban? It does? So be it ….
Lizzy's Literary Life (Volume One) 
Empty bookshelves.
I envy muchly…
They’d only go to waste if you didn’t use them, wouldn’t they & waste is not good is it, in fact it’s bad on moral & environmental grounds…….
I’ll let you finish this argument, but this should start you in the right direction.
I’m LOVING the look of your new bookshelves Lizzy, and I’m quite envious that are getting to spend a few happy hours filling them. I’d tell you to have loads of fun, but I know you’re going to anyway.
Actually, reading this has got me thinking about how I order my own library. Fact is, my bookshelves have no order whatsoever. I don’t arrange them alphabetically, and I certainly don’t display them according to colour. At the very least my books are loosely sorted by theme, but the arrangement is more unique and customised than anything else, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
You see, I believe that one’s library layout is as personal a thing as the books that one chooses to add to it, and one should have a library layout that’s as unique as the individual who creates it. For instance, the books that inspire me the most are the ones which i have within reach around the desk where I spend most of my time reading and writing. There’s the obvious reference books – dictionaries, and books on craft, grammar, punctuation etc., but brushing covers with these are those which are the most precious to me e.g. my Steinbeck’s, my Wolff’s, my Van Booy’s, my Joseph Mitchell’s, my Paris Review Interviews, my New York City reference books, and, the letter collections of writers such as Steinbeck, Chekhov, Hamsun and D. H. Lawrence. Having these books so close to me, inspires me daily.
In other rooms I’m perhaps even more ‘random’, because I tend to just slot books on shelves wherever they may fit. I may organise books by authors in these areas, but they’re certainly not alphabetically arranged, and Murakami for instance, lives quite comfortably next to Proust, whereas Hemingway’s constant companion is Shusaku Endo.
I talk of ‘loosely sorting my books by theme’, but there is one literary form that I’m almost religious about, when it comes to arrangement. I have a single bookcase in my study where nothing else but short story collections/anthologies live. As you probably know I worship the form as though it were a religion, and this bookshelf stands as a shrine to all things short fiction. A warm smile comes across my face, every time I look towards it.
Warmest
Rob x
Buying books with vouchers isn’t breaking the book buying ban. At least not the way I see it. I organize books by genre and then subgenre. Literary fiction by countries and the countries by time periods … No color code for me.
*drool*
Progress report:
This shelf-stacking is hard work. Having put in a 6-hour shift arranging by collection, I decided I didn’t like the look. ;(
And I don’t know whether Daphne du Maurier belongs in d or M.
I shall sleep on it ….
I go strictly A-Z with non-fiction & biographies separated from fiction and I put Du Maurier in D if that helps!
Two days in and all I’m saving is that I don’t have enough shelves! Going back to IKEA for more tomorrow …. Thank goodness, I took a week off work to organse this ….
As for the filing system, it will definitely be idiosyncratic or to use Rob’s more kindly phrase, unique! Du Maurier paperbacks in D, hardbacks in M, for example. Hmmm …..