How to organize your books
This week’s question comes to us from Ashley Worsham:
What is the best way to organize books in my home office?
TL;DR: however you need to organize them in order to find the one you’re looking for.
Let’s start by celebrating the fact that you have books to organize. (As well as a place to organize them in.) Growing up, we had very few books in my house. There was maybe a short stack of pseudo-religious stuff on my mother’s bedside table, with a romance novel hidden in the middle of the stack, to ensure that enjoyment and shame were never too far apart. Our living room library consisted of a TV Guide on top of the TV, which my brothers and we treated that TV Guide as a religious artifact. In fact, we spent many a Friday evening gathered around the TV Guide, splayed out on the floor just a few inches from said TV, circling the shows we’d be watching that week. The yearly issue that announced the new Saturday morning cartoon line-ups was of special significance.
The first books that needed to be organized in our house were in my room. I had a small bookshelf that did various other services, like house a small black and white television, various knick knacks, a photo of my parents that my mother insisted be on there (for reasons), and yes, one shelf of books. And if we’re going to talk about how that shelf got populated, we need to take a side quest and talk about the greatest invention of human existence (non-vaccine category), which was the Scholastic Book Club Catalog.
For those of you who didn’t just melt into a puddle of warm feelings and nostalgia, the Scholastic Book Club Catalog showed up at school a few times a year. I don’t remember how many pages it had, but it wasn’t a lot. It was just enough of a selection that there were a few books that everyone wanted to read. From Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew to Beverly Cleary to Judy Blume. Adventure. Fiction. Scifi. TV and movie related shit. Guinness Book of World Records type bullshit. It was all there. And it was reasonably priced. We’d spend our lunch going over our book club selections, and then take them home and ask our parents for money. Which we sometimes got, and sometimes didn’t. We would then walk to school with a filled out order form, an envelope full of actual cash, and dutifully hand it all in to our homeroom teacher, who put all the orders in a manila envelope, and one very lucky kid (brown-noser) was chosen to run the envelope to the principal’s office. A few weeks later a box of books would show up, and we’d sit at our desk with our hands folded, while another lucky kid (brown-noser) distributed the orders, always doing their own friends first. It was honestly amazing. When my own kid started school, I was thrilled it was still around, in fact I’d shamefully forgotten all about it. The current catalog has spread beyond books to video games and toys and while my initial reaction was “how dare they destroy a childhood memory that I didn’t even remember I had until five minutes ago,” watching her eyes light up as she circled stuff made that go away pretty quick. Turns out every generation has their own warm memories of what the Scholastic Book Club Catalog looked like, and what it meant to them, and that is beautiful.
(Also, to save you all an email: I know that Scholastic was saved by publishing Harry Potter, but the fact that JK Rowling turned out to be the world’s worst person after the fact doesn’t fall on them. She is, however, the world’s worst person. She is. She made kids feel safe and welcome and then yanked that safety away. Total betrayal. Elon Musk has always been a piece of shit.)
My first little collection of books was furnished by many orders from the Scholastic Book Club Catalog, and, like a little OCD goblin, I arranged and rearranged that little collection on a weekly basis. Sometimes by title, sometimes by author, sometimes by genre, sometimes by size. Arranging and rearranging books was a thing. Later in life, as I moved to my own place, and got more books, organizing books became even more of a thing, and because there were more of them I tended to organize them less. But having gone through recent book organizations at both home and work, I can attest that it is still something I have feelings about. And there is a very specific way I want my books organized.
Somewhere between being that excited little kid running home from school with a Scholastic Book Club Catalog and today I became a designer. The problem with a designer is that they’ll take something they have a preference for (such as how to organize books), and feel justified in telling you that their preference is the canonically correct way to do that thing. I admit to having been that designer for a little while. I admit to mocking your books arranged by color. And I apologize. There’s no way I would arrange my books by color, but that’s because that’s not how my brain looks for books. Some people have an easier time finding their books when they’re arranged by color. And it is beautiful that they’ve listened to their heart and arranged their books in a way that works for them. (We can all agree, however, that people who arrange their books with the spines toward the wall are monsters. They’re not trying to find books. They’re decorating an Airbnb.)
There’s an old John Waters quote that I hold dear to my heart: “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ‘em.”
It’s important to note that John Waters says nothing about how the books should be organized. If he has an opinion on that, I’m not privy to it. The main point is that people should have books. They should be on shelves. They should be in stacks. They should be hidden in nooks and crannies of your home. At least one table in your home should actually be made of books. There should be coffee table books that you want everyone to see, and hidden books that you don’t want anyone to see. I am pretty sure that I can sit in any chair in my apartment or at work and reach a book without having to get up. This is the goal. When the government comes to my house to look for banned books I want to make their job incredibly hard. I want it to take weeks. I want them to hang out so long that we end up having dinner together while I tell them about some of my favorite books.
I don’t trust e-book people. I understand e-books, especially when you travel. Or when you’re trying to read something that weighs a hundred pounds. But I don’t trust you if you don’t have real books in your house. Even tiny apartments have room for books if they’re important to you. I need to see evidence that you are a book person. And yes, I am judging you by your books. If all your books are “in the cloud,” I’m going to assume they’re some combination of books about the Roman Empire, capitalist efficiency, and how to be shitty to women. We aren’t going to be friends. Books are evidence of who you are, and you are withholding evidence.
How you organize those books is entirely up to you. My friend Kio, for example, has a shelf full of books she wishes she’d written, as well as a shelf full of books she’s been thanked in. And I think that’s fine. One shelf gives you something to aim for, and another shelf gives you a reminder that you’ve had a positive impact on people’s lives. Another friend has books going all the way up their staircase in a way that would make a fire marshal scream. Several of our friends do indeed have books organized by color. Our local DSA office organizes their books by the type of organizing described in the book, because if you can organize books, you can organize a workplace. Erika and I have a shelf full of different Moby Dick editions. Neither of us remembers how this got started. Throughout my life I’ve gotten at least twelve copies of Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn, as gifts from different people. I don’t know what this means, but there’s a shelf full of those too. We have at least six copies of 1984, all different covers. (Fun fact: UK cover art is so much better than US cover art.) And before you start thinking that I am bragging about how many books I have, what I’m actually bragging about is how well I’ve taken care of the books that have come into my life. You are never the owner of a book, you are only ever its current caretaker.
When our daughter moved out, we immediately turned her room into a library. (She was aghast at how quickly this happened.) We painted the room a dark burgundy, lined every wall with bookshelves and got two incredibly nice chairs with ottomans that are great for reading. (I’m sitting in one now.) We spent maybe a month dragging books from all over other parts of the apartment where’d they’d been haphazardly placed, stacked, or shoved over the years and carefully organized them in a way that made us both happy (compromises were made, they weren’t always easy) and for a few weeks our library was perfectly organized, according to a system that worked for us. Then trips to the outside happened. Often those trips meant coming back with more books, and eventually the nicely organized library grew stacks in front of the shelves, and the little table that we put between the chairs for our coffee became a place for more stacks of books. And books are everywhere again.
There should be some chaos in books.
There should also be some solace in knowing that when everything goes to shit, we have a room full of books, and those books can be picked up at any time, and an idea that was written down in the past can be released back into the present, and help to influence a future.
🙋 Got a question for me? Ask it! I might just answer it.
📚 Speaking of books: We write books, too. And we have several editions of all our books. (Designers gonna design.) You should buy them and make a big stack in your house.
📣 My next Presenting w/Confidence workshop is scheduled at a special time for friends in the Pacific Rim. So if you’re in Melbourne, Auckland, or Tokyo, it’s on April 3 & 4. Sign up!
🐔 Stop doomscrolling and judge some chickens instead.
🍉 I told you the ceasefire was a lie. Israel is murdering Palestinian children again. Please help them.
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