Okay, so long story short and having finally bought a bigger filing cabinet and found somewhere to keep the jiffy bags, I'm finally getting round to arranging my books, which came upstairs months ago.

Assuming that, like me, all WWers have far too many to be completely haphazard in their shelves, and probably rather more books than shelves at that, how do you do it?

Emma

appropriate the dining table and any other 'free' space

<Added>

all my good intentions of neatness have gone to pot.

Pile 'em up in little stacks against walls at the moment. My review books have grown and grown and have no idea what to do with them. I need a nice big library like the one at Sissinghurst!

I am haphazard, but that's deliberate, since I like to be surprised! I actually recycle books frequently, since my husband refuses to buy any more bookcases, so it's a case of one in, one out. Anything I am unlikely to reread goes out.

SG

I'd quite like to have the space to organise them the way they do at Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street - not by author's name or even title, but by geographical location.

This might be heresy but I give them all away. I always intend to keep the ones I really love but in fact they're the ones I tend to push on my friends even harder. I think it comes mainly from having moved so many times. For the past few years I've started writing down the titles and authors and a little para about what I thought of it and that's my way of 'keeping' them.

I can imagine giving away fiction: I know fairly well whether I'm likely to re-read it. But I can't imagine giving away non-fiction: who knows when I might need something for the WIP?

Emma

Yes, I agree, Emma, I can't bring myself to get rid of non-fiction.
I have two piles, one children's books, one not.

When we decided to move into this house, I planned to line the walls with bookshelves, catalogue all my books, and Get Them Organised.

What happened? We ran out of money at the bookshelf-buying stage and, seven months on, they're still either in boxes or in random piles on the floor

I can't give away any of my books. I'm the Silas Marner of the book world. They're my gold and I hoard them. I'm going to need a warehouse if I don’t manage to control this addiction!

Dee

I'm a librarian, and when I moved into the house I had shelves put up right away and arranged all the non fiction in rough dewey, and the fiction in alphabetical order. It's been like that for three years, and my collection has grown a little since then, despite a few weeding sessions and the amount of free nice books available to borrow from work.

It does look awful though, and I'm planning, when I get a free afternoon, to take them all down, dust, and arrange them in the colour of the spine. I'm going to try and make a rainbow. I actually have a very good visual memory, so I know I'll always be able to remember what colour the book I want is.

Lady B

I've just counted, and we have 14 full-height and 2 half-height IKEA Billy bookcases in the house. One, admittedly, has doors and is a china cupboard, but the rest are all books...

They're still all mixed up from moving my study though I too have a good memory for the spine of a book, and can almost always put my hand on what I want. Very rough Dewey I suspect my non-fiction could be called. Fiction is alpha by author, but that's the only one, because there's just so much of it.

When my sisters and I were young we had all our books arranged in categories too, under our own headings: 'Odd every day' was things like E Nesbit and 'family stories' was Noel Streatfield. Hist Fic arranged by period, 'Jolly Holidays' was Arthur Ransome, except that since the ethos was the same it also included school stories! And so on.

Emma

how many bookcases?! that's amazing!

I'm a recycler because I keep moving mostly.

I had four large wooden bookshelves full of childrens books in the spare bedroom (aside from the two downstairs), plus boxes of books in the corners, and a closet full. But the floor bounces and we were concerned about the amount of weight standing on it. Now everything's been moved downstairs while the floor is strengthened. That was 5 months ago and we're still tripping over boxes of books. Someday it'll all be back to normal. I hope.

- NaomiM

It's tempting to follow my son's method which is sort by 'stickyupness', then 'stickyoutness', so that they look more or less uniform, though he can never find anything. I sort my fiction into alphabetical classics then alphabetical modern. Non-fiction is more or less in categories, a category or sub-category per bookshelf/shelf, though not in alphabetical order cos I'm not quite that sad. I've just given away probably a dozen boxes because I'm moving house at some point in the near future to a far smaller house, and had to 'be ruthless', but I hate it! I hate parting with books. They hold such a sense of where and when I bought them.

my son's method which is sort by 'stickyupness', then 'stickyoutness',

One of the things which takes a bit of getting used to at The London Library, though it's one of my favourite places in the entire world, is that they shelve quarto books separately from the normal-sized ones, and if you look it up in the index you have to remember to notice which it is. Or if you're browsing, you have to remember to look in two places for any given subject. Not such a problem with literature, but with photography you do end up zig-zagging to and fro rather a lot. (Plus you have to remember that in their Victorian way, the L.Lib keeps photography in 'Science and Miscellaneous' not Art.)

Emma