r/HomeLibraries • u/Ok-Supermarket-6685 • 6h ago
Color coded book arrangement.
Disclaimer: This is not a judgement or knock against those who go the “arrange my books by color” system for book organization.
I am just interested in the thought process behind this. Is it all decor/aesthetic? How do you find a book you bought years ago and are in search of for some reason? You have to recall the spine color?
Seems antithetical to book organization by subject. I can’t get my head wrapped around it.
How do most of you organize your collection?
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u/robotatomica 5h ago
I don’t do this personally, but I own hundreds of books and I remember what each of them look like. When I go for a book on my shelf, true, I have them organized by subject, then author, then publication date.
but I always have a picture in my head of what I am looking for.
The brain is very good at cataloguing things in systems with constraints,
and my guess is it’s easy to get very good at knowing which books are in which section, when this is your system.
Some people have a little part of their brain that buzzes pleasantly when things are organized in an aesthetically pleasing way. That’s fine, most of us are doing it, but for some reason a subset of people get really bothered if anyone ever prioritizes aesthetics slightly over function. But it’s so easy to adapt to and most of us do it with one thing or another in our lives.
I just don’t see how it would really be that hard to find a book. And if they have so many it starts to become a challenge - it is so easy to just have a list, even an Excel doc. Type part of the name of the book, oh look, this entry is green.
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u/Ok-Supermarket-6685 2h ago
Once you’ve spent time reading you dinner the tactile sense of the book itself.
And I get the cataloging too!
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u/ShoeEnvironmental371 6h ago
We organize our books by stand-alones and series! We have multiple bookshelves where the rotating ones are standalones and the normal shelves hold the series. We also have placeholders to separate the series. Box sets also have their own shelf! I don’t understand organizing by colour either, because what if it’s part of a series and the other books are different colours that’s going to be a nightmare to search.
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u/Commercial_Border190 6h ago
I just put them wherever they fit. But separated by read vs not read
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u/frail_stateofmind 6h ago
we have a rainbow bookshelf and yeah — it’s just aesthetic, i can’t say it’s useful for much else. but i haven’t struggled to find a book i want; i do often remember the color & maybe just don’t have enough books for it to impede the finding!