Organising Your Home Library

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The American politician and educational reformer Horace Mann once said “a home without books is like a room without windows.” And it’s true. Literacy is one of the blessings of Western civilisation – and all civilisations, as a matter of fact. I always like looking at people’s books when visiting (scanning the titles, I mean, not getting them out and having a read), as this gives a glimpse into what people are interested in.

Your own home library is a bit more daunting. How do you organise it? How do you avoid the all too common problem of spending ages scanning a row of spines looking for one particular title without having a clue which shelf it is on – and probably missing the title in the first pass over the shelves.

 

Start the process of looking at the shelves. A common mistake is to buy a bookshelf that has many rows of shelves but these shelves are only big enough to accommodate paperbacks. If you try to start a filing system for your home library with small shelves, your system will be sent into chaos by books that are too big to fit in the shelves. Get a generous set of shelves capable of taking A4 portrait sized books, as this will hold most books, and have one separate place for “outsized” books – usually atlases.

Now take all the books you own and start sorting them into piles. Resist all temptation to start reading them – a hard ask. Having a friend on-hand to keep you focussed helps. If you are the sort of person who buys large amounts of “classic titles” with elegant matching hardcover bindings, I am afraid that I am going to be horribly unsympathetic. I am going to tell you to get rid of the ones you don’t actually read. Yes, I know they look impressive all lined up in order, but you aren’t fooling anyone into thinking you’re a well-read intellectual just by having all the titles there nicely lined up and pristine.

Everyone knows that you can buy these “classic titles” in bulk. It’s more impressive if you have well-thumbed copies.

The first step when sorting books is to get rid of what you don’t read, never will read and can’t face the prospect of reading. They are taking up space. Be ruthless. However, every home should have at least one good dictionary and a world atlas, plus the books that are a source of the best-known quotes and other words of wisdom. For typical British culture, this means Shakespeare, the Bible and a good book of classic poems, but other cultures will probably have their own classic works to add in here. An encyclopaedia (or set of encyclopaedia volumes) is another should-have, but the internet and public libraries make good substitutes.

Also get rid of any duplicate copies of books. However, I can confess to having several copies of each of the Chronicles of Narnia (four of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe), and I have found this has been good, because my children can follow along in their copies if I’m reading aloud to them. But try to avoid this – tricky, though, if you have book-giving relatives.

Then put things back on the shelves. Copy the local library and separate fiction from non-fiction. Some people like to shelve fiction alphabetically by author, but this system is very hard to maintain. Libraries, after all, have people who have the job of shelving books several times a day. Shelving them by genre is better – some libraries are starting to do this. Children’s books should also go by themselves – you don’t want to wade through Golden Books and Dr Suess while hunting for Terry Pratchett or Jane Eyre.

Non-fiction books should also be sorted by topic. You can follow the Dewy system if you can remember it and have a good inner librarian, but you don’t have to. The method used in our house roughly follows a university’s faculties: broad divisions into Arts, Science and Business (and, in our house, Practical/Manual), with subdivisions. For example, Arts is split into poetry, language (the dictionary goes here), non-English languages, religion and history/classics (myths, however, are filed under fiction). Science is split into maths, medicine, geography (travel guides go here, but the atlas is outsized), zoology (animals), botany (plants). Practical includes things like car manuals, woodwork manuals, children’s activity books and the like, but cookbooks go in the kitchen where they are used. Yes, it’s debateable whether gardening manuals go under Science – botany or Practical – garden cleaning London, but at least there’s only two places it can be, which is better than having to look everywhere.

　

Nick Vassilev is the founder of successful carpet cleaning London and domestic cleaning London businesses delivering quality cleaning services to thousands of clients.