My OCD makes bookshelf reshelving grueling...

[bicentennial_baby]

I emptied both, and added in the stacks from around the house. WOW.

So now I have 3 bookcases to fill. BUT, I organize by category, sometimes with subcategories, and sometimes by author.

This makes the 1-2 dozen piles of books/magazines/journals a bit more onerous than they should be. :crazy:

So far I've done: Cooking/Food, Economics, Knitting/Handcrafts, Fiction, Graphic Novels. Next, Politics, then History.

Kill me now.

[ReliantJ]

1. I do the same.

Largest to smallest and alphabetical. Not that I have enough for that to matter.
Clothes is worse: Pants, jerseys, sweaters by color, band shirts, etc. EHHHHHHHHH

[leftyclimber]

2. And not size?

That's what really kills me. I have genre/topic and author as the usual bookshelf categorization. But then the sizes are all messed up, and I spend hours agonizing that my books don't go downhill at that perfect angle and trying to find ways to organize them so I can accommodate all three... :crazy:

[ReliantJ]

3. Just to add some fuel.

If the books are not in order by pages, you'll get a cold.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

4. Try my method: Piling them in random heaps on the floor.

I can't find anything, but it saves a lot of time this way.

[SoxFan]

5. You forgot Dewey decimal system and home country of the author.

Get off the damn computer and fix it!

[ReliantJ]

6. Not to mention Publisher!!! and copies sold!!!!!!!!!

[DeepBlueC]

7. I once asked my doctor how he arranged books on his office shelves

He said "by color". I was stunned. This is a smart man, an intellectual, a seeker, son of two doctors, and brother to two more, and father of one ... a bookish man. I have classification systems and sub-systems more like yours, alphabetical within them. But then I realized that, yeah, if that is the way he did it, that classification system worked for him. He knew where to find things. But it was one of the most telling insights I ever had about him and the way his brain worked. The memory still puts a smile on my face. When he died I got to pick out a few books from his library and I knew myself to head right for the green section for two of the ones I wanted.

[csziggy]

8. Once upon a time the Peruvian National Library was arranged by size and color

So your doctor is not that nuts.

I've got a library science degree and my library is just sorted roughly by subject. Someday I plan to catalog them properly but there is always too much other stuff to do - like actually read (or re-read) all those books.



Remember years ago when Radio Shack was giving away those Cue Cat things so you could scan bar codes product ads and get spiff spam about them on your computer? Well, those have been hacked and a company has a program to use them to catalog your books, CDs, DVDs, etc. Readerware.com will scan the ISBN, look the book (or other media) up in online databases and help you organize them. For books you can chose what online sources are referenced so if you want to use Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal classification, you can find a source that has that information.

I've tried the software and it works great. Someday I need to pay for it and actually do my cataloging and classification!