The Library Guardian

Asking the hard questions in life: how do you organize your library? I'm pretty confident I want my non-fiction research type books in the office with me. Art books can be in the bedroom where the art desk currently is (until the Little Man moves out and I co-opt his room as a studio, which is the plan in a year or so). The pulp paperbacks are on the skinny bookshelves in the dining area, along with the bookshelf of cookbooks. Well. The way I'm acquiring them, I'm going to need a whole 'nother bookshelf for food science and cookbooks, but that's a concern for another day. 

Within the non-fiction, do I group by strict Dewey Decimal? I must confess I never did memorize all of the sub-categories. Within fiction do I organize by genre, or author? Tempted to organize by genre so I can easily find related books - fiction in paper is rarely read hereabouts, we do most of the pleasure reading in ebook, and the Little Man does audiobooks these days. It has been fun to slowly introduce him to authors and books we like, plus it's economical because there are often deals for buying audio and ebook bundled together. That's helpful when he's listening to a lot of books!

None of that solves the real dilemma, though. Which is finding the time and energy to pull the library apart and put it back together in something resembling order. We moved in, unpacked books onto shelves, got more shelves from a friend, unpacked the remaining books, were given books, bought books, ran out of shelves again... the bibliophile's life, in a nutshell. 

I think I may start on this one shelf at a time. Oh, right, antiques... do I separate those out and display 'em somewhere? 

Sigh. 

Cat Tax: Toast belleh!

And so, Spring Cleaning begins...