I do not have too many books. I don’t. In fact, by my estimation, I’m probably a few hundred short. For now.
That said, however, I haven’t figured out how to organize them. Last year, I thought I’d found the answer: alphabetical order by the author’s last name. Seems reasonable enough for an amateur’s library, right?
Wrong.
The problem is that most of my books are nonfiction. A great many of them are works by famous writers—the Greeks, the classics, etc.—but a great many more are of more contemporary writers whose names can sometimes be hard to remember. A couple of years ago, I didn’t have enough of these things to matter. Now, apparently I do. In fact, it’s gotten chronic enough that at some point, while I was reshuffling the stacks to the right when I had to add into the shelves a newly arrived order of books, I somehow took a whole stack of the “H” section and dropped it a full shelf down without even realizing it. I had to check something from Hegel and found it, along with five other Hs, in the middle of the Ks.
My wife suggested using the Dewey Decimal System, or maybe the system used by the Library of Congress. She worked as a librarian’s assistant when she was in high school, so I should probably listen to her. I don’t think I have quite enough volume for that yet, but it’s a good goal. She also suggested just separating them up by genre—philosophy, history, theology, whatever—which was how I’d had it before. I forget why I changed it up. It probably had to do with some works blurring genres and my retarded self not willing to pick a category.
If any of you have any advice, please send it my way.
QNUW: The Nightly Grind 