Others have already noted this, but Jay Parini has an essay in the Chronicle of Education about other people’s bookshelves.
I recently moved into an apartment and realized, not for the first time, that if I only got rid of my books, I could essentially move from place to place with only a duffel bag full of clothing. But despite weighing me down, I love them, and yes, I occasionally obsess about how to organize them. One of those fits is imminent, in fact, because now that they’ve been transported and are out of the boxes, haphazardly strewn around the new digs, I’m free to redo the whole shebang. They’d fallen into a pretty random pattern in the old place, so I think it’s time to go back to a system. By genre, maybe.
So, if it’s not too personal: How do you organize your books?
