Book people - want a laugh?

[fred_mouse]

I think I've mentioned previously that I signed up to the 52 week unclutter challenge already. Week 7's challenge is 'books and bookshelves'. The full link is here, but the laugh out loud point was the first dot point of 'today's task'. Quoting the relevant bit:

TODAY’S TASK: DECLUTTER YOUR BOOK COLLECTION AND BOOKSHELVES AND PURGE ALL BOOKS THAT YOU NO LONGER NEED.

• Go through your entire book collection
  
• Keep your favourites and ones that you cannot part with
  
• Donate ones for purging to a second-hand book store or sell eBay etc
  
• Minimise your cookbooks and only keep ones you actually cook from
  
• Rearrange your bookshelves with the books you’re keeping and consider organising them in alphabetical order for easy access.
  
• Store cookbooks together, textbooks together etc.

They also say laugh worthy statements about If you have lots of books just lying around the house, it’s most likely that you really don’t have a proper bookshelf sorted or even a few cubby areas for books and an implication that this might mean you don't know how many books you own (I mean, sure, I don't know the exact number. But I know it to an order of magnitude -- my catalogue count plus <100 uncatalogued for reasons + all the picture books)

Comments

[harpers_child]

Reading the comments here makes me want to properly catalog my books.

We've got 4 6 foot bookcases with mostly paperbacks and 1 4 footer with the comics and gaming books. There are stacks of books in front of the books on the bookcases because we need less space between shelves. There's a permanent stack of books on top of the gaming bookcase of mostly reference coffee-table books that don't fit anywhere.

The ones we got for xmas are in a pile in the library chair so we can read those before we shelve them.

I have aspirations of doing custom bookcases in the library.

My husband unfortunately is an alphabetizer. I've given up my sorting by genre in the name of household peace.

[fred_mouse]

I find having my books catalogued is good, because it gives me a head start on not buying duplicates (I still do, if I really don't recognise something). I'm more on your side than your husband's, although within fiction I do put in alphabetical order. But I used to have them separated by whether I had read something or not (because I bought a lot of second-hand books much faster than I could read them once Eldest was born, and when the local library was throwing things out, it might be the only time I could get my hands on some of these works). I do have some sections pulled out -- but by publisher, not genre.