shuffling books

[cellio]

There is never enough shelf space for all the books, of course. If there is, it's just temporary. When we moved into this house we allocated various bookcases to (broad) topics, and we've been adding bookcases and patching the distribution over time, but in recent months it totally broke down. With some clever furniture re-arrangement we were able to buy about another 22 shelf-feet of bookcases, and by removing the LPs and cassette tapes that we've digitized and will never play again in original form we were able to reclaim about another 18 feet. With that apparent wiggle room we set about to re-zone the books.

We sure don't have 40 shelf-feet of spare room, I'm just sayin'. We're not done yet, but I suspect that we'll end up with something reasonable that we may get away without revisiting for a couple years. I hope. :-)

The tension between sorting, within a section, by height (to optimize shelf placement) versus by sub-topic is challenging. Dani and I draw that line in different places. In practice, I think this means that some sections will tend one way and some the other, depending on who is more interested in (and pedantic about) that particular topic. We'll see.

Comments

[dragonazure.livejournal.com]

Aethetics verus sort order? Tough call. Most of our shelves are fixed height, so we cluster books as best we can. The oversized books are a real hodgepodge, though.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

There is never enough shelf space for all the books, of course.

That's a law of nature. And then there's never enough wall space for the shelves.

We're currently trying to decide whether we should just replace as many as possible of the books which came out of the bedroom (http://shewhomust.livejournal.com/301528.html), or whether to admit defeat, and use those shelves for some other set of books...

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Dance, books, dance!

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

It gets interesting when you have to be prepared to move every few years or so. I'm hoping to switch to getting digital books because it's a lot easier to carry a hard drive.