02 May 2011

Shelf Space

Not my real bookshelf
I think it's the curse of all book-lovers that we're perpetually running out of bookshelf space.

A few months back, I reorganized my shelves to accommodate all the books I had at the time. Everything was alphabetized, double-depth shelved paperbacks, non-fiction elsewhere. For an organization nerd, it was something like nirvana.

Then -- then Saturday night I went to one of the Borders here that's going out of business. The fiction was all marked down to 50% off. I know that reduces what the authors get from the sales (if anything, seeing as how Borders owes so much). But for a girl on a budget, it made buying some books possible.

And lo and behold, there on the shelf in the sci-fi section, the first five books of the Cal Leandros series by Rob Thurman. I have read the first five and loved them -- Cal's snarkiness, Niko's cool brotherly protection, Robin Goodfellow's innuendo's -- and have thought long and hard about owning them.

But now, I have FIVE new paperbacks to add to my already overcrowded bookshelves. The dilemma...

Am I the only one who thinks too much about how to organize books? What system do you use?

2 comments:

N.M. Martinez said...

I sort by relevance to me. Paperbacks I love are on the top shelf. Reference books (which usually seem to be rather large) go towards the bottom. But my book case is a mess! And I do spend a lot of time thinking about it. I hate that I have things that are not books on it.

Lisa954 said...

I keep my hardback separate from my paperbacks. My brother built me two bookcases specially sized for paperbacks. I separate them out by genre: Science fiction, and the rest. LOL