Well, well, well… So we meet again. It has been so long since I have had a chance to sit down and write a blog post! Final exams really threw me for a loop this year, but I am glad they are over with! Here in the United States, it is officially summer, and I am so pumped to get some more posts onto this blog and try out some fun new projects.
As you can probably guess (from my terrible but well-planned pun), today’s post is about organizing your bookshelf! I just re-vamped my own and snapped a picture of it on Instagram, so check it out and give me a follow while you’re at it, @brainiac_blonde . My bookshelf has always been a huge mess, as I add new books to it probably every weekend. Until now, I hadn’t really thought about the best way to organize it, and I figured there must be one of y’all who felt the same, so I brainstormed and tested a bunch of organizational methods to share with you!
To get started, you first need to pick your organizational strategy. This is the order in which your books will be displayed. There are a variety of ways you could do this, but here are some of the ways I thought to do it:
Method 1: Alphabetizing
Pretty boring, but effective when you’re trying to find a certain novel. Order the books, regardless of any other factor, by the author’s last name. If you’d like to change it up a bit, order them by the title of every book, in A-Z format. Books with numbers in the title are traditionally placed after Z, but you can place them before A if you prefer.
Method 2: Genre
This one is a little more challenging to put together, but you can group your books according to genre. If you have a wide variety of books, then starting off with fiction versus non-fiction groups may be the way to go. But if you’re like me… Fiction tends to dominate your tastes. If this is the case, you can order by subgenres. For example, one shelf for fantasy, one for sci-fi, one for dystopian, etc. You could also do this for nonfiction; a shelf for biographies, one for nature, one for self-help, etc.
Method 3: Aesthetics
I think this one is actually really fun, and if I had more books with similar designs, I would totally do it! To arrange your shelves by aesthetics, you order your books according to their color. How I would go about this is fill your shelves going by the colors of the rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. Then, after violet, bring in all the neutral colored books, starting with black then ending with white. I’ve seen this done on Instagram quite a few times and it is just so satisfying to look at. How convenient it is when searching for a certain book, I don’t know, but at least you’ll get a few pictures out of it. 🙂
Method 4: Personal Preference
This is how I organized my shelf, and it’s been working out really well. The key to personal preference is knowing what books were your favorite, or what books you are always in a mood to read. I made four stacks of twelve books, ordering them by which ones I liked and which ones I was iffy on. Then I just put them on different shelves. Simple.
The second step to putting together a bookshelf is the shape of the stack. Now, you could go with a typical horizontal stack, where the spines of the books are backing outward and the book is vertically standing. However, this leaves a lot of space unused above the books. The way I stacked my books was half vertical, and the other half stacked on top of one another. This way, I could have stacked them all the way to the top of the shelf, and fit more books in one section. Having a variety of stack shapes also makes the shelf a bit more visually appealing and easier to navigate; the titles aren’t all sideways and facing the same way and smushed- they’re varied.
I hope you get the chance to put some time into your bookshelf; seeing all of your favorite novels all lined up and pretty can improve your mode by tenfold, believe me! Plus, it always feels great to be organized! Thanks for reading and watch out tomorrow for another post!
Love, love, love,
Brainiac Blonde
Brainiac Blonde 