The Organization of Your Bookshelves Tells Its Own Story | Hacker News Reader

The Organization of Your Bookshelves Tells Its Own Story

theatlantic.com

45 pointspseudolus31 comments

Just don't arrange them by color. I see this sometimes on bookshelves in the backround on zoom and I think "What monsters would arrange their books by color?"

It looks cool when I think of it as art. But wouldn’t do it with books I plan on reading or referencing, and I wouldn’t buy books just to display sorted by color. I’d rather have a cool painting.

I absolutely agree - to a point.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to move books out of their semantically 'best' organisation if that order results in an aesthetically unappealing shelf.

As a specific example, I've mixed up a shelf's organisation because it had resulted in a row of pure beige. I didn't want that in my living room!

https://booksbythefoot.com/

This will make you sad.

I did that just to take pictures[1]. Otherwise, it is random in the main bookshelf and the one behind me for Zoom has the ones I've earmarked to read/re-read this year.

1. https://unsplash.com/@oinam

Books are often used as decorative elements. The fact you see them via Zoom speaks to their purpose.

Someone I know arranges their books by color. They said it works surprisingly well as an indexing system, because they generally remember the color of the book they’re looking for, and when they don’t, an image of the cover is a quick web search away.

My partner, a former graphic designer, does this. It's mostly her art and design books so it's not too nonsensical and she swears that it's easier for her to find books because she remembers the color of the cover/spine better than title/author/etc in many cases.

My local library does this for part of their collection. It works surprisingly well.

Many years ago, I was at a (small college) Chemistry department where the stockroom manager arranged the bottles by the color of the label.

For chemicals the label color conveys important information:

https://chemicalsafety.com/color-coded-labels-for-chemical-s...

Interesting, although that is a proprietary system. Label color was not informative at the time.

I worked at a retail bookstore for a year a while ago, and at the time it seemed to me a good organization system. People's eyes & brains are really quick at picking out colors, faster than reading names or numbers. (Obviously that's not what bookstores do, but working there made me want it)

Somewhere in the vast halls of the Library of Babel are a set of shelves that precisely mirror this author’s arrangement of books at home.

Nothing interesting, just some fiction books being stored everywhere. It's like I begin to tell to non-technician about what programming books I am storing in toilet and what I have studied perfectly.

The ones in the toilet are the ones you actually read. So, your example tells its own story.

Which ones on the shelves are within reach of your arm from the chair? They're most likely to be the second set, the ones you need, in crisis. The rest? they're ego, history or sentiment.

My partner and I almost exclusively read kindle now. Our books are organized as "in your room, they're too dusty to have out in the world any more" and are mostly alphabetical, fiction split from factual, with reference books buried because we don't refer to them any more, and few opened these last 5 years. Some of the beautiful ones are behind UV resistant glass.

We check the cookbooks periodically.

I don't keep books in the bog any more. I used to read Brant Parker, Johnny Hart and Bloomsbury there. My mum kept Georgette Heyer, and Elle (in french) there. My dad had his stash of Edgar Wallace.

In my house it is fiction with fiction, art with art, graphic novels with graphic novels, reference stuff with reference stuff, classics with classics, seems easy enough.

All right thought I guess my russian books are all together, whether it is Tolstoy and Pushkin or Manifesto of Comminist Party, 18th edition from 1886, a great read actually.

I'm kind of mystified by the authors description of fiction books organized by kinship rather than by author. Non-fiction-- sure!

But "the shelf above my desk" may not be very many books, and if so the order hardly matters -- order by color if you like.

For our books[1] fiction is by author, then whatever makes the density better. I think lately I've been slowly reorganizing them toward making it easier to pull out series in order from each author.

If we ordered fiction by 'kinship' I think I'd never find any of them, and it would be kinda hard to shelve books we haven't read yet.

[1] https://nt4tn.net/bookshelves/ ... though these pics are a couple years old now.

I just order four BILLY bookshelves to finally sort out my books. I enjoy books it sparkles joy. I don't really have a lot of technical books, mostly consists of history books, archaeology, anthropology books.

I use Delicious Library to catalogue them, shelf by shelf (I have the Microvision RoV Bluetooth barcode scanner they support), and a workflow to make this very efficient: select the shelf in DL, go to the shelf, scan all the ISBNs (the scanner has a memory), come back and watch as the barcodes are poured wirelessly into DL, looked up on Amazon for cover art and other metadata, and appear on the virtual bookshelf. Very satisfying.

I'm not sure how much information is contained in the organization per se versus how someone explains their method.

Alphabetical by author, then by title. What it tells you about me is that I have a lot of books and like to be able to find them when I need to. This business of organizing by whimsical connections doesn't scale well.

What tale does it tell if [some of] my books are organized by the color of the spine?

(It wasn't me who did it, but I left it that way when they did it.)

Ex-lover?

Sounds like one hell of a story that, oddly, I would probably nod along with in solidarity and a general sense of “yep, mine was like that, too”. Came out of that relationship a much more grateful and humble person even if it didn’t work out between us, and every now and then I look over at my bookshelf and smile.

First round’s on me ;)

Oh man. I guarantee they were inspired by The Home Edit, who are the Instagram'd version of Marie Kondo with none of the depth. Lots of "organize by rainbow color", not a lot of practical advice.

You are correct :)

After having moved countless times within the same city I moved all my books to digital and will never look back.

Dewey Decimal for me. Except I put programming in the Applied Sciences (600) not the Generalities (000).

Mine are organized by which one I read last. Or tried to read and didn't finish.

Tsundoku

Joke’s on you. There’s literally no information to be gained by the way my books are disorganized.

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