All (almost) about arranging books

In our previous home, in which we lived for about 18 years, there were just not enough shelves for my very many books and they had to be crammed together on top of one another.

Not my books, but this was how they looked like on the shelves in our previous home.

When we moved into our new home about three years ago, I made sure that we have enough shelves around the house. What fun I had opening up the many boxes and then arranging and rearranging my books on the shelves. It took several days and at the end of it all, I got the books fairly organised.

The TV in the family room upstairs has bookshelves right, left and above it - my fiction and travel books are on the right, while the non-fiction and Islamic books are on the left. Above the TV are our Holy Qurans and books that have been autographed by their authors. The shelves in our home office are for my business, English language, including dictionaries, and work-related books. To-be-read books wait patiently on the shelves in the master bedroom, where there are more Islamic books.

In the TV room downstairs, I have my special edition books as well as big/coffee-table books on art, interior decor, house design, decorative painting, photography and horses as well as horse-riding. Here are also my Malaysian Encyclopedia volumes and other books on Malaysia. I also have a few coffee-table books in the living room. And don't forget the cookbooks in the dry kitchen/family dining area.

Other than their general location, there's no method to arranging my books. The most I've done is to have books by the same author together. So if I'm looking for a particular book, I have to scan all my shelves to locate it.

It appears there's more to arranging books than just putting them on shelves. Interior designers apparently like using them as design statements, especially in living rooms. I wonder whether guests would be allowed to take one of the books and flip through its pages.

In the set-up below, large books are stacked up to make a table. Not what I'd like to do - my books would get dusty and dirty and water from the vase might drip onto the top book. What if I want to read the book at the bottom? Those books look heavy!

I discovered that there's a rebellion of sorts in the book-arranging world. People are asking, Why must books be arranged vertically on shelves? Why can't they be placed horizontally?

When you have hundreds of books, you might consider a simple classification system. Mine is about as easy as it can get - organising them by broad genres. They could be arranged alphabetically by their authors' names, which would help in finding a book by a particular author. But I think it would involve quite a bit of work when new books are added to my collection because I would have to move books along down one shelf and onto the next one and the next one. Lately, there is a trend towards arranging books by colour. I've had a look at the spines of my books and they don't seem to come in such a rainbow of colours as in the picture below.

So for the time being, I'll just keep it simple...