Says Büchertiger (BT) to her husband (H): “What do we want to do this weekend?”
H: “Let’s do something fun!”
BT: “We could go out to a museum or exhibit.”
H: “Mhm, is there an interesting exhibit at the moment?” (sounds skeptical)
BT: “Sure, there are lots! Or would you rather stay in?”
H: “What could we do here?” (sounds much more interested)
BT: “We could rearrange our bookshelves.”
H: (Face brightens up) “Yes! Let’s do that!”
The hard thing is to decide on how to group the books. In the past we tried to arrange them by publishing house which also didn’t work well because we had too many categories with only one book in them.
Then we separated the fantasy and sci-fi books, and arrange the rest by language. But this also didn’t work out quite so well because the distinction between fantasy and non-fantasy is pretty artificial. And it sometimes separated the books of one author. Also we have copies of the same author in several languages. And this, also, seemed artificial.
Now we arranged them by language of the original. The interesting thing about arranging books is that you learn something about your library. I expected the “English” category to be big, but it turned out about 4.5 times as big as the “German” category (so we definitely have to buy more German books!). The “German” shelf is not even twice the the size “Eastern Europe”, including Polish, Russian, and Czech, which is followed in size by “French”, “Chinese”, “Spanish”, and “other”. Also the non-fiction received a new ordering, and also here it was interesting to see how many books fall into which category. It turned out that I definitely will have to buy more travelogues.
We have a lot of non-fiction books, so we arrange our bookshelves by subject matter and by size. For example, all the cookbooks go together, sub-grouped by whether they are a certain nationality, vegetarian, or are mostly food history. The small ones are kept in the small shelves, the big ones on bigger shelves.
However we haven’t re-done our shelving for several years and have piles of books on the floor that don’t fit into the current arrangement. Must spend a weekend re-doing the bookshelves soon!
We re-arrange our book probably once a year or so. Part of the fun is to see the books the other has bough. My “want to read this” shelf has grown to a considerable size through this weekend, haha!
So you have a lot of cook books? We have those separated in the kitchen. This group is relatively small, filling less than a meter in the shelves, and they are completely unsorted.- Now that I have a look at it: I think we have more dictionaries than cook books (at least shelf-space wise) 🙂