Most of the time when I am writing about books, I am writing about reading books. Of course I like to read books, but I also like to arrange books, display books, be surrounded by books. A house without books is a house without soul. (After writing that, I thought it was so insightful that maybe someone else had come up with the saying before me. Sure enough, Cicero wrote: “A room without books is like a body without a soul” and from Horace Mann we have “A house without books is like a room without windows”.)
Last Christmas, my husband gave me not one, not two, but three books on living with books. I got so excited reading one of them that I couldn't get to sleep one night. My mind was percolating with ideas on things to do with books. I couldn't wait to share some of my ideas, and the ideas of others, with you.
I'll start with ways of arranging books. Lately, I have been noticing an unfortunate trend in home design magazines and television shows. Books are being chosen to decorate rooms solely by the colors of their bindings. These are not books to be read. They are just three-dimensional wallpaper. I was in a public space of an upscale apartment building recently where bookshelves were filled with black, red, and white books. Decorators have been buying “books by the yard” for years, but they are really going hog wild now. The worst example of this is shelving books with the spine in so that all you see are the edges of the pages. Supposedly this creates "a neutral background", but if you are a reader, you can imagine how difficult it would be to find the book you are looking for. I did succumb to the lure of having a rainbow of books, as you can see in the photo. These are my "to read" shelves so the books don't need to be in any sort of order.
Before Melvil Dewey came up with his Dewey Decimal system in 1876, there were many ways of organizing books: by size, by color, by subject, by author. For the home library, you can make a case for each of those.
Size: It does make sense to separate those little, mass-market paperbacks from larger books. Also, you are often constrained by the spacing of the shelves in your bookcase - especially if you don't have adjustable shelving. But remember that tall books can recline in a stack, horizontally, if you are trying to group books of various heights by subject or some other means of organization.
Color: The seventeenth century diarist, Samuel Pepys, had his books bound in leather of different colors (for different subjects), but uniform style. On January18, 1665, he wrote: "Up and by and by to my bookseller’s, and there did give thorough direction for the new binding of a great many of my old books, to make my whole study of the same binding." You can, of course, do something similar by covering each and every one of your books in papers of different colors - red for mysteries, pink for romances, brown for westerns, for example. Just make sure to attractively label the spines. One of the books that I received for Christmas is about a company which, on commission, recovers or rebinds books in uniform bindings for each author or topic. Not only that, but in some cases the spines of the books make up a picture. For example, when the collected works of Jane Austen are shelved correctly, a peacock spans the spines. If you are artistic, wouldn't it be fun to cover a group of books in watercolor paper, clamp the books together, and paint a picture across the spines - just make sure paint doesn't seep through.
Subject and author: If finding a certain book is important to you - and I hope that's the case - group your non-fiction books by general subjects and alphabetize fiction by the author's last name and biographies by the last name of the person the book is about. Here are some examples of how I have fun organizing my books. I mentioned Samuel Pepys earlier; I have the eleven volume set of his diaries, the 1920s Everyman edition of the diary, a biography of Pepys, one volume of John Evelyn's diary covering the same time, books on Restoration London, and a biography of Charles II all in one bookcase in my office. Some day, I may read all of those books. So far, I have only read Pepys. Another bookcase is groaning under the weight of books about other countries and great cities of the world. There is a fairly comprehensive stack of books by the children's author/illustrator, M Sasek, starting with his first book, This is London. Brass models of Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower sit on those shelves. Two bookcases store my books on interior decoration, really hefty, metal bookcases that can accommodate tall books. One shelf in another room houses books on World War II Japanese civilian internment camps along with a book I made for my mother with photos from her youth in the Philippine Islands and a plate that commemorates the first flight of Pan Am's China Clipper with regularly scheduled air mail service across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Manila, on November 22, 1935. In short, whatever enthuses you, put those books together.
There is no room in our house (except bathrooms and laundry room) that doesn't have books in it. Cookbooks in the kitchen. Old calf bound books stacked up to serve as a pedestal for something I want to show off in the living room (and more books are stacked next to my favorite reading chair). A wide hallway has room for bookcases along both sides. I am always looking for better ways to organize my books and to make them a beautiful addition to my home decoration. I really do have fun with books!