I am a bit organization obsessed. Everything in my home has a place. (That doesn’t mean that everything is always “in it’s place”, but at least it has one! haha). Books are no different for me, they have to be organized somehow.
When trying to decide how to organize our bookshelves I leaned toward practical. At first I thought that would be separating them into a few categories such as fiction and nonfiction and then putting them in alphabetical order within those sections.
However, our home library is where we keep all our children’s literature. Middle grade chapter books on up are kept on a different bookshelf in our home. Because of this the room is mainly focused on my two very young children. (One of which who can’t read yet.) I knew that trying to separate by categories and alphabetical order would be too difficult for them to do on their own right now and I wanted a system that they could successfully use independently. This library is primarily for them after all.
Because of this I decided to use the simplest system that I could think of that required zero reading skills: color. It is so easy for my kids to grab/borrow whatever books they want to read and when they are done they can easily slip them back with the group of books of the same spine color. It keeps our library looking neat and tidy and away from complete and utter chaos.
A HUGE perk of this system (besides the most important: functionality) is how visually appealing that beautiful spectrum of color is. Every time I walk in our library the rainbow of books makes my book nerd heart skip a beat. Sure, it takes me a bit of extra time to find a specific book, but I have gotten surprisingly efficient at associating books with their spine colors. Besides, this is only temporary. As my children get older I plan on organizing them differently to better suit our needs in a different stage of life. The books on our shelves are constantly changing, our needs are constantly changing, our interests are constantly changing, so why not the organization of our books?
If organizing by color isn’t a system that you think is the best fit for you or your family, below is a list of ten more ways you can consider organizing your books. Keep in mind that multiple options can be combined, for example I originally planned on dividing our books into categories and then putting them in alphabetical order within each category. Organize them in a way that makes sense to you, best fits your needs, and helps you utilize your books and library the way that you want to.
You can organize books by:
- size
- genre
- subject
- alphabetical: title, author or illustrator
- “read” and “haven’t read”
- fiction vs nonfiction
- type: board book, chapter book, picture books, hardcover, softcover…
- date: acquisition or publication
- geographically or by language
- priority: to read or how much you like them
If you pick one or more and the system doesn’t seem to be working the way you like, don’t be shy about changing it! Your bookshelves should reflect you and be there for you the way that you need. Plus, in my opinion, organizing books is so much fun. Wouldn’t you agree?!
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