How to Organize Your Home Library: A Round Up of Creative Ways to Manage Your Book Piles at Home

 

I'll be honest, my fiction is often stacked vertically in places randomly put, like next to my bed, office desk, on top of my dresser/nightstand, in the living room...you get the idea. My cookbooks are the ones that get billing on the shelves and since I have so many, and I categorize them by theme or category (breads, cookies, meats, regional cookbooks (separated by country or US region), fish and seafood, preserving, etc etc etc) making it super easy to look something up.

For those of you that have are in need of some book organizing tips, here are some ideas to dive into.

Start with this 7 step plan to organize your bookshelves: this is more of a designer feel to organize books as six designers were asked their favorite tips, and you generally have to have a lot of blank space to feel the most impact.

When you have a very large collection, read up on 15 ways to keep your out-of-hand collection of books in order. Yes, the first step is to cull your collection, but just think of all that room (for more books, I knew you were going to say that) - that you now have for better organization.

If you do have a large collection that you want to keep no matter what, here are some pretty great ways to organize them all, 12 ways to organize all your books - from genre or subject (which is what I do), by color, or the most imaginative way - to organize your books by how they make you feel.

Another article showing how to organize your bookshelves shows a couple of new (old (read: classic)) ways to organize them: by the Dewey Decimal or the Library of Congress systems. If you have a ton of books in a wide range of themes, topics, and categories, this might just be the way to go.

Let's say you have a lot of books and no bookshelf in site. This article shows how to arrange books sans bookshelf from underneath things, in things, on top of things, or just stacked up vertically in neat rows (although I have no idea how you are going to get to the one book you really need in the middle of the stacks without knocking them all over). All the ideas are fun, and make you think, yes, I can put that book stack anywhere.

Then, lastly, if you can't really get into the groove of organizing your hundreds of books collection, why bother organizing your books at all article is for everyone who organizes their books, but doesn't really organize them at all.

Enjoy,
Renee Shelton
Succotash Book Reviews
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Disclosure and More Info: Most books found in the reviews are purchased by me and some have been given to me by publishers or the writers themselves. Some of my large cookbook library collection can be found on The Library Thing, which is a constant work in progress to categorize all my books. All reviews are independent and opinions my own. Any affiliate links help support this site. :)