I’m having a good year so far, how about all of you? ^_^ I went to a party at a friend’s last night and got to reconnect with a lot of people I hadn’t seen for a while. Then today I spent the day napping and reading manga. Totally unproductive but really really nice.
I did want to try to resurrect a couple of ideas I failed at last year. One being to draw something every day. The little bunny on this post was my drawing for today.
Now for a question for you manga/book people. Some of you might have seen my tweet/facebook status about my new shelves. The link will take you to a bad cellphone picture where the light from the windows make the shelves look ethereal and mystical.
Being that my friends are mostly book-nerds, I wasn’t surprised when one of the comments was about how I planned to organize the books in my new library. (It was also one of the first questions I got from both the person who installed them and the first person who saw them up.) I think everyone I know has a closet librarian in their heart.
Actually, of the three people who’ve asked one is currently a school librarian and the other a daughter of a librarian… so my source group might be a little slanted towards a book organizing bias.
But back to the question… how should I organize my books? Each shelf holds about 110 (115 if I really pack ‘em tight) of manga. I’m thinking that will organize them by author… but on my old bookcases I organized them by how long the series was and if it was a “complete” or on going series because it made it easier to shelve new books. I had two for “completed” series, two for series with 15 volumes or more that were on going, one for series that I have for series 14 or less, and one and a half for “one and two volumes so far” series (the other half of the one shelf were unread books with one shelf dedicated to volume 1s and the other for later volumes of ongoing series).
I know it sounds complicated, but since most of my books were double or triple stacked on the shelves it made it easier to have the long series together where I could layer the first 10 or 15 behind the newer volumes since I probably wouldn’t want to read them again and the series I was actively adding new books to all together so if I had to re-arrange to lend or add in new books I wasn’t having to move around the completed or big series.
This of course all refers to my manga collection, the lion’s share of my books. I don’t tend to horde “regular” books as much as manga because they’re easier to replace or find in a library.
With my new shelves, I should be able to put all my books out in one layer when the shelves are all done. The shelves up currently only hold about a third of my manga collection, but two other shelves are in progress making for 7 shelves on that wall with two of them being longer (going above and below the window) and 5 mini shelves for the other side of that window. That should allow me to put about half my manga collection up on one wall, which is plenty to start organizing and inventorying.
I really need to inventory, I’ve already found four duplicate volumes bought in the last couple of months because my book database isn’t up to date.
So how do you all organize your books? By title, by author, by genre, or size (either size of book or length of series)? I’ve tried all of those at various times with some problems each time, but I’m interested to hear other people’s takes on it. I know some of you out there have as big or bigger collections then I.