I have my books organized in big groups of fiction and then non-fiction (and then some of the non-fiction are organized in to sub groups like a particular topic or something). The fiction are organized by alphabetical order of author's last name.

The non-fiction is organized into groups such as "writing", "travel" etc.

I have two bookshelves full of books TBR mostly - one five-shelf bookcase and one three-shelf bookcase, There are some of my DH's books on this as well, but to be honest, it's mostly my stuff.

I tend to get rid of books once I have read them unless they were outstanding. I need to keep space available for books I am buying.

HaHaHaHaHaHa! Organized?
My bookshelves are organized by the amount of weight a shelf can hold before it starts to sag...dangerously.
I have books behind books, behind books.
One good thing about this system is you discover interesting books you forgot you had.
Yep, I read 'em and if they don't make the cut, they go to charity. Lots don't make the cut. But more come in all the time. I'm trying to cut back, but it's a disease.

I am currently stiving to reorganize, as the shelves usually need a redo every couple of years. First I need to wade through the other stuff around the shelves-my office becomes the temporary furniture storage room duirng the holidays.

We have bookshelves in every room of the house except the dining room and the bathrooms-we tend to carry things in and out of those. About half of the shelves and books are DD's, and I keep sending emails to both her and her fiance about what is here for them to take...but as they will be living on the third floor of a building that is about 100 years old, he is afraid that all those books will have them abruptly living on the second floor, or even the first! Books are heavy! Also-we don't want to carry all those books up to the third floor in the first place.

In my office, I have a wall of built-in shelves, and to the left of the window is non-fiction, the right side is fiction. I group by author, and except for a very few favorite authors who I buy as soon as theya re published, I don't buy a book I haven't all ready read-and know that I want to reread someday. In that way, theoretically, I don't buy a lot of books.
However, through rp, I have become involved with two online swap sites....and so I have a whole 'nother free-standing bookshelf that is all tbr-and all from paperbackswap.com or bookmooch.com. Then there is the "listed to swap" bookshelf-books that I received and am willing to send back out again. The basket with packing and shipping materials sits on top of that shelf. That shelf is alphabetical by title so I can quickly find books that have been requested.

By author, by height, roughly the Dewey system. I stopped patronizing the bookstore nearest my home entirely because it was organized by title. I kept getting anxiety attacks every time I walked into the place.

Sometimes I put books together in ways that amuse me, and only me. For example Sharyn McCrumb's The Ballad of Frankie Silver (husband killing) is next to McCullough's Caesar's Women and Bitteroot by James Lee Burke is beside M.F.K.Fisher's translation of Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste.

Kinda'-sorta'.

I've tried to keep all the books my book club reads shelved together. I also have tried to keep all my professional books shelved together. Trouble is, I keep lending out books, pulling books to share with others, and buying more books! I have run out of room and have tall stacks on the floor and around the house. I will be retiring soon and one of the major items on my to-do list is weeding out books I really don't care to keep any longer.

I can remember books by their spines. I have long kept a library in my classroom and prided myself on grabbing a book quickly because I knew what its spine looked like. Since the students were encouraged to borrow freely, I never kept them organized.

Mine are a mess but I know where everything is :) I have two bookcases upstairs, one full of TBR books (crammed to the hilt with books behind books) the other full of "keeper" fiction books grouped by author, though not alphabetized. Downstairs I have several bookcases, one full of travel books, one for special authors (Barbara Pym, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Peters, Bill Bryson - it makes no sense, they just fit nicely), one for non-fiction by topic, and another for dog books and sci-fi. It's a jumble, but it works for me.

I have a long-standing fantasy of someday owning a home with an extra room lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, and furnished with a cushy chaise longue, a window seat, and some big, comfy arm chairs. THEN I'd organize my books alphabetically and perhaps even by Dewey. Bliss!

Oh, yes, mine are organized. I spent some time after getting the house cleaned up after Christmas putting away books that had accumulated since the last put-away. Mine are alphabetical by author, which means every book has to shift forward from the new books onward. (As I've said before, gives one pause when buying an author in the first part of the alphabet.)

Like Cece, I have books in every room except the dining room and the baths. The den is lined on 2-1/2 walls with floor-to-ceiling shelves; there is a big bookcase in the living room; the bedrooms have smaller cases; the kitchen has cookbooks. And I am almost out of room again! That's because I cannot part with any book except the most horrible. It feels like selling my children.

It's a sickness, I tell you; and my favorite authors keep on writing. It's sad being a perfectionist.

The only things that are organized in this house are the DVD's! I started that as I bought new ones upgrading from VHS.

Other than that like CeCce & Carolyn we have bookcases in all rooms except the dining room & baths. I even managed to squeeze in a bookshelf in the hallway outside the bedrooms.
I think my DH is worse than I am about buying books. He only reads non-fiction, but unlike me he won't get rid of one book!
I tend to shove finished books wherever I can find a space & depending which room I am in when I have finished the book.
Other than that, books that I have read or the TBR's are all mixed together.
I did do some thinning out last Fall when the Friends of the Library had a sale and I will do it again in March for the nrxt sale - just in time to buy more.......
pat

I have dedicated one room to be used as the library. I bought library shelving in ivory steel with birch side panels & upper & lower trim. The walls are covered by them. I also have books in my office & family room. Those in the library are grouped by topic (most are non-fiction), and I have one area set aside for new arrivals as TBR. A little OC, but my background is medical librarian.

Fiction, yes. A-Z by author - though the order within each letter is not so strictly done.

Non-fiction are anywhere and everywhere. I do try to sort them out - like all the biography is in one bookcase - but it always seems a hopeless job.

It wasn't helped by a cleaner we had for a while who used to sort the books on every shelf by order of size, largest to smallest.

My first editions are kept separately, of course.

We have bookcases in almost every room in the house. It quite shocks me when I see people who have living rooms with no books at all. Mind, their rooms look nice and big compared to mine; books do take up space.

I also have a kinda', sorta' system. My books are divided up roughly like this:

-by size - the big books are shelved together, roughly by genre, and the very small books all go together on one shelf (with the poetry and audio books)
-reference books are all shelved together
-TBR books are shelved separately, all the mysteries together by author and the rest by colour
-fiction is divided into fantasy/sci-fi, romance, mysteries and "anything else"
-non-fiction is ordered roughly by genre - cookbooks and foodie books have their own shelves, as do linguistics and translation theory books, travel books and biographies, and everything else is bundled together regardless of genre
-myths, folk-tales and religion have their own shelf
-books I am offering on BookMooch have a separate shelf and are ordered alphabetically by title.

Only the TBR mysteries and BM books are ordered alphabetically. The rest are mostly ordered by author but not in alphabetical order. I tend to shelve series by publication date.

I have a work room/library where I keep most of my books (double stacked to save space), but there are always a number of volumes drifting about the apartment and piling up by the living room sofa, on the kitchen table, by my bed and in the hall.

Oh yes!

My A format paperbacks, B format paperbacks and trade paperbacks are kept separately, as are my few hardcovers. Within the format it is alphabetical by author, and chronological within author. The reference books have a shelf, non fiction is sorted into subjects, then by height within the subject. I also have one shelf of TBR, one shelf of astrology and one small bookcase with TBR (working in a bookshop means I buy a lot of books without the time to read them).
I have a study with all my bookshelves in it, although there are usually 2 or 3 books on my bedside drawers. I can't wait til the kids leave home - they both have a large bookcase in their room and then I won't have to cull my books to fit more in!

I have my own peculiar system, which would probably make no sense to anyone else. I have tended to shelve books in the order that they came into my life. e.g. I still have books bought in college days shelved together. Then, in another section, all my beloved tomes from childhood. Yet another shelf holds the books my husband I and bought together, mainly to do with history.

Like many of you, every room in my house except the dining and bathrooms has bookshelves. I even have books in attractive baskets on my living room floor. I have a variety of bookshelf styles, one of which is the sort of glassed in bookcase lawyers used to use -- it's made of old oak.

I don't have enough shelf space, so mine are organized much like that described by deep___roots. We have bookcases in all of our bedrooms, our office and our den, and some stored in boxes in our closets and under the beds.

Ideally, if I had space (floor to ceiling shelves in major rooms of the house), I'd organize all fiction alphabetically by author and/or size (I absolutely hate it when publishers get creative with book sizes!). Non-Fiction would be organized by subject and author.

Woodnymph, my husband calls those barrister bookcases. We have an antique one he bought from a friend, but he also made one for our bedroom that I love. It's deep enough for at least two rows of books. Unfortunately, it's maxed out and I need another one with no place to put it!

The normal state of my bookshelves had always been disorganized until last year when we leased out our house with most of the library and the furnishings intact. I hired a library science student and her assistant to inventory and get the books in order. They bandied about terms such as Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress systems, but those sounded too institutional to me, so they wound up dividing the general fiction into alphabetical order by author with the mysteries, suspense, and gothics separated into their own groups. The nonfiction was sorted into rough categories of my own specification, then alphabetically by author. The nonfiction is mostly in the library itself, while much of the fiction, according to individual taste, is in other rooms.

They did pretty much the same thing to all the bookshelves in other rooms. I even have bookshelves in my dining room -- why, for some of you, is this room bookless?

The students did an excellent job. I now can find books I haven't seen in years!

I did remove the books I am sentimental about and the few valuable ones I own and put them into secure storage. The tenants are lovely people and they seem to have returned every book to its previous place. Either that or they didn't read anything from the house shelves; which I can't imagine!

Oh dear! I think I have already failed the tidiness test and am just glad that I have any bookcases in which to keep my moth-eaten but much loved tomes off the floor.
Some years after we moved here I got a carpenter to make a couple of bookcases that are fitted within the chimney breasts of our drawing room . . . sounds posh but isn't.
We have high ceilings (about 10 ft) so to reach the top shelves is quite a balancing act and it is up there that I keep the few very old books I 'inherited'. OK let's be honest. My parents moved house in the '60's and in the back of an old barn found several boxes of books; some going back to the 1720's. Mostly very dull bound copies of sermons but they add an air of gravitas to the room and I'm sure the spiders enjoy them.
CMK, do I know where everything is? Not quite. I have put the DH's photography, gardening and how to raise chicken stuff together, and the reference books . . . atlases, maps, guides, dictionaries, encyclopedias etc are near at hand. My late Mother's classics are together as is her collection of nautical/seafaring works. All her life she suffered from wanderlust and found family-life very restricting. :-)
As for fiction. As Martin mentioned cleaners can play havoc with one's arrangements. They like to put everything in order either of height, colour or size. "Them big books make the place look untidy, you wants to take 'em to the charity shop."
The shelves are also home to various board games, Scrabble, Monopoly etc. In the dining room more shelves were built to house DH's science text books and piles of jigsaw boxes.
Kath, your boys may go away from home but I warn you, when our older kids 'left' they failed to take their childhood books etc with them. Now they quietly gather dust out of the way behind bedroom doors.

I neglected to say that my hard covers and paperbacks are separated, which can cause confusion since I have some of each with some authors.

The only reason I don't have books in the dining room is that it is very small and houses another love--dishes. I particularly like pitchers and cake plates/stands and have a few old family pieces as well.

Carolyn, I once rented a vacation house at the lake that was decorated with pitchers, must have been 25 all over the great room. Only problem was that I could never find one to make iced tea.

Frieda, I'm with you. Dining rooms have doubled for the library in most of the places I've lived. Is that cataloging how you managed to get so many books into Bibliophil.org? I was jealous of how quickly you added books to the list. I gave up part way through and have since given away so many books, I'd have to start over. And I never had more than a fraction of what you own in the first place.

Wow! Some of you get fancy with the organization! Several sort by height and one by color. I am impressed.
It looks as if I am the only one who sorts by title though.

-Friedag, you must have a TON of books to warrant hireing someone to organize it! How many do you have, if you don't mind my asking?

I recently adopted a system of buying books similar to that of CC's. I check the book out of the library first, then if I like it enough I will buy it to add to my little collection. I started doing this after I totaled up how much I spent on books in a year.
Pretty much any classic is welcome on my shelves, even if I did not really care for it. But not so for modern books; if I did not like it I cannot stand to see it fraternizing with my favorites.

Oh! I would love to have an entire room set aside to be a library! There was an old library building for sale recently. I saw it in the local paper. Only $560,000! I must have a problem with books, because I actually considered it for a second...
CMK

Frieda -

You asked why some rooms are bookless. In our house, we work hard at keeping it calm and clutter-free, so bookshelves (although lovely in and of themselves) do not fit in with that. I keep them in the back room.

Also, I am really trying to keep the level of book-buying/keeping that I do to a minimum and have a rule that for every book I buy, another must be got rid of. We live in a small house and we all know how books tend to multiply unless they are closely supervised.

I'm reminded of that that old movie "My Fair Lady" because a lot of the scenes are in Professor Higgins's library which seems to be an enormous 2 story room with nothing but shelving for books around the walls. Ladders and a staircase too. Looks like an arrangement we all could use. I know I could, especially if it comes with Audrey Hepburn included.

My books are about as well organized as my life. Some I haven't seen in years. Some I trip over all the time. Some are here in Wisconsin, some are up in Canada. I often have to stop and think about where I was when I last read a book, before I decide if I should look for it in this house or not.

My dining room has little wall space-one wall is the french doors to the outside, the opposite is the archway into the sitting room. The other walls have the doors to the kitchen and office opposite each other. I have a table and chairs in the middle and a breakfront and a low server on the longer walls-I could squeeze little bookshelves in but it would look forced and out of scale.
When DD takes her books, she is taking the shelves too! When we toured Jefferson's home, Monticello, this summer, they mentioned that he sold his personal library-the largest in the colonies-to Congress to replace the one burnt by the British-all 6487 volumes. She turned to me and said "we can beat that!" Her fiance and my husband paled.

Organized? ORGANIZED??? I'm with Deep Roots on this one in that my organization is based upon how many I can get on a shelf. The shelves are double stacked, unless of course, I can manage to somehow triple stack 'em. They are piled up in every room. Great towers of TBR piles. For the longest time, I had the "twin towers" on my desk here, until my daughter pointed out that they would completely demolish my computer screen should they fall. I bought bins to keep under the bed that are filled with books, I have dozens upon dozens of boxes packed in the basement, I have bookhelves in every room including the built-in one in the kitchen. Once, someone asked what was on our nightstands.... I mentioned about fifteen books. Now I have closer to forty-five there. They are literally EVERYWHERE. But somehow, be it good memory or concentrating on what means a lot to me, I can put my fingers on almost any title in a short bit of time. I have a hard hard hard time getting rid of any of them and even books I give as gifts come with a sticker note attached, "Can I read it when you are finished??? I almost kept this one for myself!"

My husband always tells me the same things:

"If you bring one more book into this house, the entire first floor will fall into the basement."

And:

"Why oh why must you buy all of these books and then GO TO THE LIBRARY and get more???"

He just doesn't get it. He puts up with it, but he doesn't get it.

PAM

I can always congratulate myself on having fewer TBR books than PAM. The books on my shelves are organized (fiction by author and non-fiction by subject) but the problem is all the books that won't fit on the shelves.

A couple of weeks ago I started volunteering with the Friends of the Library to sort and shelve donated books to be sold in the library's Book Nook. I told myself that this would be a great way to contribute books on a regular basis and reduce the vast numbers in my house. So far, I have purchased three books from the Book Nook but have contributed no books. A good plan gone awry!

I sometimes think they watch at the booksales and draft the biggest buyers to be the sorters next year-hey, why shlepp all those boxes of books onto a truck and then off a truck if we can sell them from the warehouse? (I was asked to head up the internet sale part........I rest my case.)

cece,
Is that why they keep calling me????

PAM

yup.

Organized? I need serious professional help. Despite my admittedly half-hearted culling and sorting attempts, books and other reading materials are taking over my home. Luckily I don't live in an earthquake-prone area. I'd be in serious danger of being crushed to death by my TBR pile. Oddly enough, I can lay my hands on any book I need in seconds.

One way of keeping down the number of books which I have accumulated in the last 60 years is to keep moving around the globe and sadly having to abandon at least three collections. As my present home has very limited space, I can only have a few shelves. My daughter keeps most of my new library in her home, filed neatly by author.
The books which I must keep by me for reference or are much loved and frequently dipped into friends, are in higgle-piggle order. Pushed into where they will fit or I can find a space. Deplorable for a former library worker but, hey!, I'm retired and can please myself. I'm just sorry that I have lost so many OOP books but where would I put them now anyway? DD does not have an unlimited number of bookshelves!

Some years ago, in our local newspaper, there was a story about a top story apartment that collapsed down on to the apartment below, doing major damage. Upon investigation, the upperstory apt. was found to be inhabited by an elderly man who collected books and newspapers for many years. Turns out the weight of all this caused the collapse. True story and a caveat? ;-)

PAM, I had to laugh out loud when I read of your habit of giving books as gifts, then saying "Can I read this when you have finished?" So I am not the only one....

This year, I am making an earnest effort to weed out and give away many.

oh yes, woodnymph-I was serious about the worry in DD's fiance's apartment. He is a teacher and all ready has books up there-add hers and it could be dangerous.

More or less. It's not Dewey but it is an arrangement that makes sense to me.

I have a lovely problem facing me. We are finishing up a small remodeling job in which we added a window seat and bookshelves to a niche in our bedroom. Now, what to put on those shelves? I'm thinking not any particular subject, but a combination of my TBR pile and a selection of my very favorite books that I read over and over again.

Rosefolly

I have a horror story to relate. I was paging through a magazine recently (I think Woman's Day); and an article complete with pretty pictures advocated shelving books in white cubes by color, placing them both vertically and horizontally, putting a decorative item on top of some of them, and NOT FILLING THE SHELVES for the sake of appearance. Said you could store your books somewhere else. Are they insane?

Oh, I enjoyed this thread! I have to add that the only room without books & bookcases is my bathroom & that's because it's too humid! The dining room I'd love to turn into a "library" but haven't managed to yet. Mine are sort of organized by topics within a bookcases. The two in the dining room hold all the field guides for birds, butterflies, wildflowers etc. Then there are two in the living room with (mostly) gardening. My bedroom has a row of shelves built specifically to hold paperbacks(double stacked)These are mostly beloved books that are read again and again. The breakfast room (who thought of a room just to eat breakfast in?) has two small shelves of series (mysteries)Oh and another shelf of cookbooks! The back bedroom holds all of my late mothers books-complete Agatha Christie & several other mystery series that I read occasionally. Then there are several miscellaneous (sp?) bookshelves scatteried where ever there is room-one of those tacky metal ones from college is in the hallway below where I hang my coats! Oh the livingroom has another one for dictionaries & other reference books. And after my mother passed away in 2005 I started a library at the facility where I work with mentally challenged adults-so I could clear space on the bookshelves (and I had a bad case of insomnia)Like most posters I can lay my hands on a book fairly quickly-of course some of them have been in the same place for 50 years so... Hope this is not too much information! I got a real laugh out of this as not all my close friends are readers & don't understand why I need all these books!
Susan

Another horror story - a new decorating craze is to fill your bookshelves with the PAGES facing out, not the spine. So it all looks like white blocks.

How crazy is that? Obviously no serious readers there.

OOPS I forgot my cookbooks. I have one entire kitchen cabinet (42" wide-3 shelves) devoted to them, plus a string of them on the desktop below. But I'm doing pretty well--I restrained myself for the past 6 months--no new cookbooks.

Do I dare note that I'm using my cookbooks less and cooking websites more?

I live on the 3rd floor of a warehouse built in 1897--it's been through a number of earthquakes, so I trust it more than any new builds.

I organize non fiction books by subject matter, fiction by genre and then author, and then by height. We've got 6 Ikea Expedits filled on both sides, and about 6 smaller book cases, so I'm guessing we're in the 1000s of books range.

I dream about organizing my books but alas--only the bookshelves in the front hall are feebly sorted into categories. Polar exploration; art books; fiction TBR; American history...The deeper into the house I go, the less organization there is--the dining room has floor to ceiling shelves and it's a free-for-all; just about every room has built-in shelves and free-standing bookcases and tables of books; even our walk-in closet has bookshelves.

But I can, if I concentrate really hard, conjure the image of a book, and get a general idea of which room it is in. But sometimes it'll take days to unearth a particular title.

I forgot to mention that I, too, have a walk-in closet with books on shelves....

idee-I love my expedit shelves!!!!-my problem is that the nearest Ikea is like 7 hrs. drive and I only have managed to pick up 1 (bookshelf) so far. It holds so many books and doesn't look half bad either.
As far as organized-the only thing that is "organized" is that 2 shelves, or is it 3?, are reserved for books related to knitting.
some of you may remember when I moved and "purged" 4 yrs. ago. Since then the 8 or 9 full bins that I could not part with have resided on shelves in the downstairs. Well, good news. We remodeled 1/2 of our walk-out basement into a multi-purpose room so now perhaps I can squeeze in another bookshelf and let some of my poor books out of their plastic prisons.

my bookshelve is a mess, I try from time to time to organize it, but I fail each time; my last attempt is this:
Librarythings.
masgar are the first letter of my real name and surname

grelobe

p.s. the dog is not mine, I found it surfing the web, and I adopted it, we're getting on quite fine

Here is a link that might be useful: Librarythings