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.

[cellio]

I don't think it's aesthetics so much as pursuit of optimization.

Oversized books are a problem, which we handle by creating occasional shelves just for them and dealing with the fact the some books aren't in their proper sections. In addition, some of our shelves are (functionally) fixed-height and on the large side, so there's an obvious place to put the art books, for instance. (Theoretically the built-in shelves in the living room can move, but some previous owner did something to ensure that the pins wouldn't move. Probably the solution is to drill them out and fabricate new pins, but they aren't a standard size so it's not just a matter of getting spare parts from IKEA or something. This requires some actual fabrication that we haven't yet attempted.)

[dragonazure.livejournal.com]

Immovable pins? Paint or glue, probably. Are the pins metal or are they wood? If you need replacement pins, try Woodcraft. Restoration Hardware might have something as well.

Eventually, ealdthryth will finish cataloging the books, then she'll probably want to sort them. Once she has them in a spreadsheet, she can group then sort them and therefore have a plan to follow.