Organizing the spines

What do your shelves look like? Do you organize your books like this–

??

One particular blogger & Russell fan  (hi, Katie!) likes to look at the spines, although she does admit to a hitch:

It’s especially fun when a friend asks about a book: let me see where that is. Oh, yes, the cover is blue, but the spine might be red. Some series, like Laurie R. King’s excellent Mary Russell mysteries, are scattered all over the place.

I can only assume that Katie has a much better visual memory than I do.

(Read the rest of her Shelf Awareness post here.)

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4 Comments

  1. Kimberly Wylie on January 11, 2020 at 3:41 pm

    I would love to organize my book collection like this if only for how visually gorgeous it is, but I would go crazy having no real kind of order to it. I work in a library, so my shelves end up organized like a library – fiction by author’s last name (and thus my copies of Miss Russell’s memoirs are all tucked on their shelf together in series order). Admittedly, I’ve never thought to try and organize my nonfiction via strict Dewey Decimal, but I do have it organized by subject, and then by author’s last name, so it’s probably not too far off.

  2. Kate on January 15, 2020 at 3:20 pm

    My partner and I had a conversation about this the other day. He expressed surprise (or something) that I ‘group’ (his word) my books together in ‘series’. I only keep my books by the same author together, and only because it seems (to me) blindingly obvious to do so! I didn’t tell him about the hierarchy on the shelves – who goes where depending on how special they are to me – thought that might be too much for him!

  3. Laura on January 21, 2020 at 8:20 pm

    I’m with Kate. There are thousands of books in our home (we’re two retired history professors), organized and not-so-organized in all manners of ways that are logical only to us. But when it comes to my most treasured fiction, I dedicate shelves in my study to keeping my favorite authors’ works together. Wouldn’t it be interesting for Laurie to set up a photo gallery where her readers could post other pictures of where they keep their Kings?!

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