As avid readers, we have a lot of books at home and we pile up all the books at home. It takes bibliophiles a great deal of time to search for the book we want to read. Sometimes, we can't remember exactly who borrowed our books and we find disappointment seeing our favorite books that used to belong to us on other's shelves. Fortunately, we have various ways for neat and clean bookshelves when it comes to how readers catalog and sort books. In this post, I share with you some strategies for your bookshelves.
Making a list of books
I used to mention this quote “A short pencil is better than a long memory.” in the previous post. No one can remember what bibliophiles read and the number of books in their book collection. This is because book lovers always purchase books without any reason as a girl goes shopping with many bags in their hands.
Nowadays, there are many tools for readers to make a list of books. They can create a sheet on an Excel file or Google sheet. It depends on their preference, book lovers have their own list of book collections and easily update their list anywhere and any time with handy devices such as smartphones or tablets.
Catalog books by genre
Diving books into genres will make it easier for you to manage your books. You may have one shelf for fiction, another for non-fiction, a third for self-help, and so on. You can refer to Dewey Decimal Classification which assists you to sort your books by genre easily. You can access the link (https://classify.oclc.org/classify2/) and enter the title of the book. The website will give you the exact result. You may not understand the number, but don't worry about it, I'm here to help you out. Take Harry Potter by J.K Rowling for an example. In the Eddition: 23, you can see 823.914. You just need to focus on 823, and don't care about 914. After that, you access this link and find the 823. Finally, you can know that it belongs to English fiction.
It is quite difficult for readers the first time, you get used to cataloging books by the Dewey Decimal Classification the next time.
Additionally, some books offer Dewey Decimal Classification in the book’s description, and you can separate your books this way to save your time.
Arrange your books by color
All book lovers know this quote “Don't Judge a book by its cover.”. We read many books without attractive covers, but we can't put the book down while reading. However, we can't deny the fact that we buy books due to their cover. Nowadays, publishers invest time designing book's cover, and we purchase them even though we have ones in our bookshelves, which leads to a big book collection.
If you are not only an art buff, but also a bibliophile. I recommend you to arrange your books by color. You put all books which have the same color on the cover in one shelf. For example, the first shelf I put all books with black covers, the second is white, and another is red. By doing so, you establish a visual memory in your mind; therefore, you don't waste your time looking for book covers.
Organize books by how much you like them
When you read books, do you prefer ones to others? You can put your best-loved books on the top, love in the middle and least loved favorites at the bottom, which makes it easy to recall the location of your most interesting books. When my bookshelves get full, I always take books to charity.
It is very difficult to keep track of your large book collection, so you can combine it with genre or other kind of classification to make it easier.
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