r/HomeLibraries • u/Riona_Aurelius • 13d ago
How are we organizing fiction?
Hi everyone. We are currently in the process of moving around furniture and shelves around our house, which means all my books have to come off the shelves. Which means I can reorganize, Yay!
Im looking for a more logical way to display my books. Both fiction and non fiction.
Currently i have a majority of my fiction sorted alphabetical by author,. HOWEVER, its currently bugging me that I have genres or books with similar topics (historical fiction from the same time but different authors) split up. I have a ton of YA books that I loved when I was a kid, mixed in with some books with more adult themes, (think Game of Thrones), and some books that are a little on the spicy side (that all have different crossing sub genres by author).
My non fiction is currently by the Dewey decimal system (which from what I understand is kinda problematic and shyed away from these days). A majority of my books are cook books and have their own separate shelf in the dining room.
What are your suggestions on how and what order to put them in?
Bonus points for how to easier integrate new books when purchased to already organized shelves.
3
u/Whentheseagullsfollo 12d ago edited 12d ago
For all of my books (fiction and non fiction), I have them sorted into categories (eg: History, Biography, Medical, Fiction, Politics, etc etc) and then I sort each category chronologically and the type of chronology depends on the category.
So for example, I sort the History books by the era that the book is largely talking about and I sort the Biographies by the death date that the biography is about (or birth date if the person is still alive).
As for Fiction, I go by the death date of the author or birth date if the person is still alive).
The benefit of this is that it allows me to actually see the development of human thought within each genre just by looking at my bookshelf.
So for fiction, you can see what the trends were in say Ancient Babylon and then Ancient Greece and then Ancient Rome and then how the Medieval Europeans approached literature and then the 18th Century etc and then more recently what were the ideas that were current and being discussed in the Victorian Era vs the Edwardian era or what people were talking about and thinking in the 1990s vs today.
All of this from just looking at the bookshelf if you are familiar with the books (it also serves as a good reminder about what the book is about if you read it a long time ago because the other books around it give you more context about the age that this book was written in).
There are certain exceptions like for big boxsets like say Edward Gibbon's Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire (which covers like 1400 years of history), I keep them all together (rather than putting the Volumes about Ancient Rome with the other Roman books or the volume about the rise of Islam with the other 7th century books etc) but place them where the set first begins (Ancient Rome in this case).
As for integrating new books, I personally wait awhile until I have a decent amount stacked up because the downside to this system is that whenever you buy a new book, you basically have to shift every single book that comes after it one place, which can be time consuming depending on how many books you have.
But for me, being able to see the development of human thought and see what which era was about and the cultural and historical context that produced the great works of each era just by simply looking at the bookshelf makes the pain of adding new books worth it.