#ShowMeYourShelves

Recently, I acquired two (free!) large bookshelves from a family that was moving and couldn't take the shelves with them. Each has five shelves, the lower two of which are protected by cabinet doors, and all but one shelf is large enough for two rows of books.

Up until this point, the majority of my books were being stored in either boxes (in my closet and under my bed) or in a big-ass pile in a corner of my room. But when I got the shelves, I was finally able to get most of these up off the floor and into some much neater stacks. I didn't think to organize them yet, though.

Around the beginning of this month, November 2014, I realized that my shelves were woefully unorganized. When I acquired a new book in a particular series, I found myself having to browse around the shelves (and some of the remaining stacks, as not everything is able to fit on the shelves even now) in hopes of finding where a certain series might be hiding. Essentially, it was a time-consuming pain in the ass.

So I start reorganizing immediately. This was easier said than done, of course, given how many books I own. (Hint: it's nearly two thousand, and that's not counting ebooks.) I began reorganizing sometime around November 1, 2014, and I'm still not completely finished. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

When I set out to reorganize the shelves, I decided that the most reasonable way to begin ordering the books was in alphabetical order by author's last name. This took quite a while and quite a bit of space, but this step is now finished (and has been since around the seventeenth of the month). So in the picture at the beginning of this post, the bookshelves are all currently organized alphabetically by author's last name, starting at the top left-hand side and going from front row to back row (except on some lower shelves when I got lazy; I'm going to eventually need to fix these, but at the moment, I'm not worried about it).

The bookshelf now contains authors from A (beginning with Tony Abbott's The Hidden Stairs and the Magic Carpet) to M (ending with Machiavelli's The Prince). Everything after Machiavelli, all the way down to Zullo, is currently being put in large storage boxes... which is a project I've yet to finish. Most of M through Q is still in stacks waiting to be boxed up. I'll get around to it, I swear!

In 2015, I'm going to be starting a project with the goal of reducing my number of books until everything can fit on the shelves, but more on that in December!