Organising your books

[bbailey861]

I love BILLYs. I have four in my study.

Can't say I do, they're frakking ugly.

But incredibly practical, and with glass doors on them it means I can store books in the bedroom without having to give dust on my books another thought -ever.

At some point in the future there's going to be world peace... this is possibly achieved by the leaders of the two most antagonistic fractions finding themselves in the same IKEA-store buying BILLYs, and the rest -as they're going to say- is history.

I agree, they're not beautiful. I love them because they are flexible (so many sizes! optional doors!), easy to put together, affordable and fairly sturdy. They make a decent-looking, simple background for the clutter in my study. I wouldn't dream of mixing them with the antiques and other "good" furniture in the rest of my house!

I did the IKEA thing, too, but went with 'Hemnes' instead in the black-brown colour.

 

[PKTrekGirl]

I hate the (lack of) system used in book stores: they muddle Fantasy together with SciFi so that when I'm looking for books about spaceships and technology it is horrible to have to look through the mass of books about magic and vampires and witches and whatnot. :wall:

Plus: Not all authors stay within one single genre.

Well, I actually don't have that much SFF, so that particular example doesn't bother me as much.

But I know what you mean. For example, I have a lot of books about mountaineering on the 8,000 meter peaks (Everest, K2, Annapurna, etc) and other large mountains. Jon Krakauer is one author who has written a few books about mountaineering, so I want to put his stuff in that group...but then he goes and writes a book about the guy who died in a school bus in bush Alaska (Into The Wild - they made a movie out of this one) and a book about some cult of religious wackjobs in Utah or someplace like that.

Now what do I do with those?

Authors who do stuff like this totally mess up my system.

 

[Miss Chicken]

Then you have Douglas Adams who wrote sci-fi/fantasy and then turned around and wrote "Last Chance to See" (which I have in my non-fiction section far from Adams's other books.

 

[trekkiedane]

^Exactly!

Plus: should an entertaining non-fiction book, say one that reads like a thriller but is about past real-life events, be with the novels or with the history books?

And how about Star Trek-books: would a book with Star Trek blueprints belong in the fact-section???

 

[Mary Ann]

I'm more fussy about sorting fiction from non-fiction books, so sort my books this way rather than putting all books by a single author together. The exception to this rule is the books by Umberto Eco, which are bunched together due to lack of space on the non-fiction bookcases. Also, if the genres of two books written by the same author are very different I sort them by genre.

Bibliophiles may have different sorting and stacking methods, but most of us appear to be very fussy about how we do it.

 

[trekkiedane]

Bibliophiles may have different sorting and stacking methods, but most of us appear to be very fussy about how we do it.

Hmmm... Here's one way of looking at it: Being fussy about our systems can be seen as a symptom, as can collecting books in the first place...
I think we may find other symptoms if we look at this thread in more detail and I wonder what our diagnosis may turn out to be

 

[Miss Chicken]

I consider myself to be a sane bibliophile, but I think my brother is suffering from bibliomania.

Just after my sister was widowed she want to come to Tassie for Christmas. She hadn't spent a Christmas in Tasmania for more than 35 years. She was worn out from looking after her terminally ill husband for several months. She also wanted to spend time with my terminally ill mother. Because we had our own children staying with us neither my sister or me had a spare room. Mum did but it had my brother's books were scattered all over it. All my brother would have to do was put away as many books as would fit into the shelves and pile the rest in neat piles around the walls so there was room for my sister to have a mattress on the floor. My brother refused to do this. He also refused to have her on a mattress in the loungeroom because he liked to watch sports all night on the big screen TV.

In the end my sister visited in February when the spare room at my sister's became available.

After my mother's death in June my brother stopped paying the household bills and spent more than $200 a week on books. After our inheritance came through his spending on books has at least tripled (but he did pay off the backlog of bills).