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 How many recipes have you seen for chocolate chip cookies? Um...a lot? Me too. What does that have to do with organizing a home library? Well, there seem to be as many ways to organize your home library as there are ways to bake those yummy, chocolatey morsels.
What you do with your books depends very much on your temperament. See if one of the Book Temperaments below describes you.
The Librarian:
Dewey decimal system, of course. First, books are organized by topic (reference, biography, self-help, parenting, fiction, spiritual, etc.), then alphabetized by author or subject.
The Aesthete:
Organized by spine color and/or size. Yes, I know someone who does this with her books. They look delightful on her shelves. The aesthete may also artistically group books on shelves, not necessarily filling each shelf. Plants and other picturesque items may be interspersed with the books.
The Categorizer:
This is me. I’ve got these categories on separate bookshelves: toddler books, older children’s books, library books, show books (otherwise known as coffee table books or books that are too big to put anywhere else!), books we often reference, classic books, chapter books to be read through by me and my four-and-a-half-year-old son, devotional books, bedside table books, parenting books, paperback fiction books, non-fiction books, professional and graduate school books, and extras. The “bookshelves” for these categories range from places in a regular bookcase to shelves on a whatnot to space on top of a storage dresser, and they are in every room of our house.
The Ultra-Organized Categorizer:
Books in each category may be alphabetized and even placed in order of original publication date.
The Space-Saver:
This is a type of organizing for those who have very little space, few bookcases, or can’t stand to group together items of very different sizes. The space-saver, for any of those reasons or for others, groups together books of similar sizes on each shelf. This works especially well with bookcases that have adjustable shelving so that one shelf can be shorter and another can be much taller for the big books.
Which one are you? Would you like to use a different method? Rearranging books can be a pleasure or a pain - and the emotion it evokes in you probably depends a little bit on temperament, too. For those who love to fiddle with books, doesn’t rearranging them sound like a lovely snow day activity? (That is, if your kids are old enough to be occupied elsewhere.) For those who hate the idea but still want to do something different, try taking 15 minutes per day - no more - and changing one shelf at a time.
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People are not only concerned with the high cost of bottled water to our wallets and the environment, but also the low quality. Here is what New York Times columnist Bill Marsh had to say in a recent article: “Those eight daily glasses of water you're supposed to drink for good health? They will cost you $0.00135 -- about 49 cents a year...
