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If you have a lot of books at home, this scenario may sound very familiar to you.
"Where could I possibly have put that book?" you ask yourself, rummaging through piles of all shapes and sizes. "Did I lend it to someone?" you wonder. "Could I have given it away?"
I used to misplace a book at least once a month. Since I have a large collection, it was a frustrating experience to say the least. Sometimes I'd end up with several copies of the same title, thinking I needed to replace the "lost" one.
One day, appalled by my bulging and disorganized bookshelves, my friend Linda offered to spend a day helping me organize my books so that I'd never lose another one. Together we devised a great system for organizing -- and finding -- books quickly and easily. Here's how it works:
1. Gather all of your books from all over the house, and put them in the middle of the floor.
This is going to look overwhelming at first, but trust me, it's the best way.
2. Start sorting your books into piles of rough categories: reference, cooking, fiction, history, etc. Sometimes the categories will overlap. Don't worry about that for now; put any books in question in a separate pile, to be figured out later.
3. Within each category you may find several subcategories. Approach your biggest rough-category pile and begin to subdivide it into stacks. For example, if your largest pile is "Fiction," break that up into smaller stacks of Science Fiction, Classics, Best-sellers, Romance, and so on.
4. Look at the "undecided" pile and see if any of those titles fit better into a subcategory than into the rough categories. For example, under "Nonfiction," you might have the subcategory, "Biography and Autobiography." If your book about the Beatles focuses on their personal lives rather than their music, perhaps it is better suited to the Biography category than the rough category "Music," subcategory "Performers." However, if you think you'll be more inclined to look for anything Beatles-related under Music, by all means file it with other books about performers and performance.
5. You are now ready to shelve your books...but first, consider where you are most likely to need and read them. Cookbooks, for example, will best serve you in or near the kitchen; the books you'll use for reference should be easily accessible to you from your desk. You may find that you need to install more bookshelves, in more places.
6. Inasmuch as possible, keep rough categories together, with subcategories on their own separate shelves. Group books alphabetically within each subcategory by author.
7. Don't worry about keeping books in size order, but if you are doubling up on your bookshelves, try to keep the paperbacks in front. They are not as handsome as bound books but it's easier to see over them and move them to get to the larger books in the back.
8. If you have a lot of mass-market (small) size paperback books, stack them on their sides, face up, with the spines facing you. This will prevent bending.
9. If you find that one category's books are larger and heavier than another's, place those categories on lower shelves. This will keep bookcases from toppling over or leaning forward.
10. Some very large books will not fit properly on a shelf along with others in their category and can be placed together on the bottom shelf. Those weighty tomes that can be considered "coffee table books," such as oversized art and photography books, look great on -- what else? -- the coffee table.
11. Finally, think about which volumes you want on view. Your library says a lot about you, and visitors often like to look through other people's books...so you may want to keep trashy best-sellers, or books about your medical conditions, on a closet shelf, while displaying quality literature and travel titles in public areas.
One last thought: if you lend someone a book, make a note of what, to whom, and when...and place it sticking out between two books on the shelf where the book belongs.
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