Since we moved in to our new home in January, our books have been sitting in boxes. Not the kid’s books, but all of our adult books. Wait! Not “adult” adult books! Just the books owned by grown-ups. Ack! You know what I mean!!
Anyways, one day the other weekend I unpacked all of our books, purged a couple more boxes beyond what we got rid of before we moved, and spent a day organizing the bookshelf in our home office.
The result…
To me, a perfectly organized bookshelf is one that groups like things together and is visually pleasingly arranged. It makes it easy to find what I am looking for and is nice to look at while I work at my desk.
So here’s how it all breaks down:
1. Both top shelves house my Real Simple magazine collection. I have saved them since 2003 and I like keeping them all. Then each month, I pull the back issues from that month and put them out in my home for perusing. This way I have lots of seasonal simplifying ideas around at all times.
2. All of my “business-y” type books on one shelf. Books on marketing, advertising, website content planning and management, online copywriting, graphic design, typography, etc.
3. My fiction shelf.
4. A little pile of gardening books.
5. More magazines. Two stacks of home décor magazines: House and Home and Style at Home.
6. These sliding doors hide books that aren’t so pretty look at. In here…all my yearbooks. Nobody needs to see those!
7. All of my art and art history books. Just my faves saved from my school days.
8. We you wouldn’t know it from this list yet, but this is a book shelf for me AND my husband. So he has a few shelves just for him. (Well they have his things on them, but I get organizing rights!) These two shelves feature all of his artsy shmartsy books and journals: his McSweeney’s collection and all of his graphic novels.
9. His fiction and other misc small books shelf. Including quite a few baseball and other sporty books.
And interspersed are some family keepsakes, photos and interesting objects gathered over the years. The end result is a shelf that makes me happy – well organized and easy on the eyes!
Do you have some books that are packed away and are begging to be displayed? Or a mega cluttered bookshelf that is crying out for some order? Take a half-hour or so and organize a shelf or two. You might get addicted like me and end up with a newly reorganized library!
Printer-friendly version