Organizing your books

More accurately, organizing *my* books, because I feel like this is very much going to vary based on your reading tastes, books collected, shelf space and more. But people do ask me how my library is organized, so I thought I'd share here:

My religious nonfiction books are roughly organized: Reference books, like Atlases, concordances, all-the-_____-of-the-Bible, Bible handbooks, Customs of the first century, that sort of thing.

Bible study or commentary of specific books in order, Gen-Rev How we got the Bible, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable, textual criticism stuff,

 General theology (Attributes of God, nature of Christ, bad things/good people, the meaning of suffering...) By topic, but there's no particular order to which of those topics comes 3rd and which is fifth, etc.

Social Issues by issue, i.e. apologetics, prolife, charity, homosexuality, usury, gender roles Church history,

 Christian living by topic (prayer, fasting, hospitality, etc)

Because of the sheer volume, I have a whole different bookcase for family- parenting, teens, wife/mom/women,husband /dad/men.

Any extra Bible class study books of the fill in the blank type Missions and related including missionary bios such as Bruchko, The Word Came with Power, Peace Child, Desert Pilgrim by Thompson, Missionary Methods, St. Pauls or Ours?, etc.

All the C.S. Lewis
All the Chesterton

 Other Christian biography not missions related alpha by subject.

Inductive Bible study books

 I do not have a lot of Religious fiction, and the stuff I do have is largely mixed with related fiction. That is, my Grace Livingston Hill books rub shoulders with Janice Holt Giles, D.E. Stevenson, Elizabeth Goudge. These books also keep company with my Robert Heinlein, Andre Norton, and other science fiction/fantasy, as well as Agatha Christie, Patricia Wentworth, Michael Innes and other mysteries. In my head, this hodgepodge of fiction is 'Mama Reads.'

 The Chronicles of Narnia and Three Cousins Detective Club books are on the same shelves as the Boxcar Children, Happy Hollisters, Lynn Austin's fictionalized retellings of some of the stories from the Old Testament (Restoration Chronicles), and Lloyd Alexander.

 Again, I feel like what works best will depend on your interests and contents of your library. If you have only one or two books each on abortion, charity,missions, fasting, etc, a very different arrangement would make more sense than if you have 5-15 each.

I have a bookcase with my Great Books of the Western World, followed by books about books- reading lists, literature textbooks, books like Adler's How to Read a Book and Veith's Reading Between the Lines, followed by Memoirs, mainly because I favor literary memoirs.

 My picture books have no organization at all because children look at them and children cannot put them back where they got them from. I do have a couple small wooden crates in which I keep the books I would like to read aloud to the grandchildren.

 I have a bookcase of myths and fairy tales and hero tales. There is no particular arrangement here, except that any sets are together, and I kind of like all the King Arthur together.

 I have several bookcases of juvenile fiction. They are arranged alpha by author.

 I have a bookcase or two of ancient to medieval history, up to the age of exploration. These are in chronological order. This area also has a couple of vintage history sets, like John Lord's Beacon Lights of History, The PIcturesque Tales of Progress by Olive Beaupre Miller, and so on.

 Poetry goes together, except for Mother Goose, which I collect and they have their own shelf.

 William Morris books are shelved together in my living room where they can be seen.

 Health books have their own shelf.

 Nature study/field guides have their own bookcase.

 Science books are stored roughly by subject, with a separate bookcase that houses all the books that are too tall to stand upright in the other three bookshelves.

 Math is on a smaller bookcase nearby.

 Modern languages have a couple of shelves, which is what happens when you have grown up near Mexico, lived in the Philippines and Japan, learned sign language, tried to learn Korean, and are moving to Malaysia. I am slowly divesting myself of the French that one of the kids studied, because that kid is now 36 years old and has five children of her own and has decided to go with Spanish for her family.

 I have a bookcase, or two, of 'education' books, which includes books about homeschooling, about teaching specific topics, about education in general, old Cliff note guides are there, as are my Mad Libs books because they help with grammar.

 I have another bookcase for Charlotte Mason books, old hardbacks, old bound copies of the PR, books she used in her schools, books by her, about her and her methods.

 American history is chronological, but there is not any order beyond that- 20 civil war books might be together, but not alphabetized.

 Autobiography and biographies (except for missionary bios) are alpha by subject.

 Gardening/homesteading books take up an entire bookshelf of their own.

 Literature for high school and up, Dickens, Tolstoy, Tolkien, Jane Austen, Homer Hickam, Somerset Maghaum, P.G. Wodehouse, these are in about six very large bookshelves and arranged alpha by author, but not more carefully within that. If I have 12 Dickens books, they are just randomly organized, but all together. David Copperfield might appear before Bleakhouse and after Our Mutual Friend, it just depends. I have another bookcase of travel and geography books.

 I have another shelf of philosophy and political stuff.

I have one which holds a lot, but not all, of my more fragile vintage titles that I probably got from my grandparents and great-grandparents.

 Finally, I have an overflowing bookcase of art and music titles which needs to be purged but I probably won't get around to it soon enough. I also have a towering pile of 'TBR' books by my bed, and it keeps growing and I'm not going to finish it before we go to Malaysia in January, which saddens and frustrates me.

That's roughly it. There are some little exceptions here and there, and that includes a cupboard full of books I had hoped to read with my youngest before he finished high school but we never got to all of them, and he was still in high school when we moved to the Philippines so I've never gotten around to putting them all back where they go. I think I am afraid that if I do, they will end up overflowing the shelves where they belong and I will have to do more purging. I'd rather not. So that is how my books are organized. This reflects my tastes and the weight of different topics in my library. Yours should be different. But possibly this will be useful to some of my readers, or at least fun to read, as book people do like to read what book people are doing.=)

I have approximately 48 bookcases.  Most of them are very tall.  They are in pretty much every room in the house and spread out over two floors.  Our house is much too large for us, but I need room for the books.  I was working towards making my library available to AO families who venture out this far, a Legacy Library named after my grandmother, but then we got the all to go to Malaysia in January, and I will not have time to do that before we leave.  Maybe when we return.