It has been a while since I've done a Sunday Salon - things have been a bit complicated and crazy since we got back from honeymoon in September, but hopefully that is almost all over now, and we will all start to feel a bit happier for the New Year. So, on to the big news! This weekend we've been moving. As a result of this the Armchair is no longer actually next to the sea. We are only around the corner, but I will miss being able to see the sea from my window. However, to make up for the lack of sea, I do now have my own personal READING ROOM!! Currently it's full of boxes, but hopefully soon it will have a little sofabed and desk and a big standing lamp, and the walls will be lined with bookcases. I am so excited about it! :-) It would be nice if people would stop making so many nursery and baby remarks in reference to the second bedroom, but being the eldest of seven it's kind of expected of me so I guess I'll just have to put up with it.
So, the most important query I have this week is one I know lots of people have asked in the past, and is in relation to organising books, as my day off this week will be spend with giant cups of tea, sorting out my reading room. I've organised my books most ways that are possible in the past - prior to moving I'd got them in a system I quite liked. As we only had the two rooms really, in the bedroom I had all my 'keeper' books. Then in the living room I had one shelf for non-fiction, biography, ARCs, classics, poetry and literary criticism, and one big shelf for all my unread books, categorised by shelf. My latest idea is to organise them by publisher and then alphabetically within publisher group. This is mostly because I've recently fallen in love with Persephone books and I think they'd look beautiful all together on the shelves, but I realise this probably isn't the most practical way to organise my collection... Does anybody have any suggestions?
Oh, and the other great thing about moving is that we now FINALLY have reliable home internet, so I should be able to post whenever I want to, rather than whenever I remember to plan ahead and bring my laptop to work with me! Very happy Sunday, everybody, and a late Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans!
My shelves only house a small portion of my books, but I have found it easiest to have them alphabetical. The only exceptions are my collections of Penguin clothbounds and my Shakespeare titles. I find it way easier to find what I am looking for if I have it set up this way.
ReplyDeleteOnce we have a bigger place and more of my books can find their way out of boxes, I imagine I'll organize by genre, then alphabetically (the exception being series-I like those in order).
My shelves aren't really organized (especially now that I've packed all my books away), but how I did it was: favorite books are all on one bookshelf, TBR books on another, and books I want to keep but aren't my "favorites" go on a third (or in the closet). Then I grouped them roughly by genre or favorite author (except for the TBR books which were grouped into "review books" and "non review books). Diana Wynne Jones got her own shelf, for instance. Susan Cooper got a section of a shelf, and so did Diane Duane, etc. :D
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