The Nest Library: Organize Your Bookshelf

organize your bookshelf

Four Fun Ways to Store Your Beloved Books

A lazy summer afternoon spent in a hammock with a glass of lemonade and good book sounds perfect, doesn’t it? But where do you store your books while you’re not reading them? We’ve rounded up our four favorite ways to display your books and organize your bookshelf.

By Color

This trend has been all the rage for a while…and we hope it doesn’t go away! A rainbow of books is incredibly playful, inviting, and fresh. While some argue that books can be hard to find this way…color is a powerful memory trigger, and you’d be surprised at how easily you are able to remember that your beloved copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar has a white cover.

This whole-wall bookshelf from Elsie of A Beautiful Mess is stunning. To keep this to a strictly rainbow palette, books that are white, brown, or black have been stored elsewhere.

nest realty - bookshelf

Looks like these color-coordinated bookshelves by the amazing Eliza Morrill are both kiddo and doggo approved!

bookshelves by color

By Genre

Follow the flow that most bookstores have, and organize your books by genre. This makes it easy to choose a book that suits your mood. Start with two main categories: non-fiction versus fiction, then sort from there, depending on what’s in your collection.

Common fictional categories are: fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, thriller, romance, westerns, dystopian, contemporary, and comics or graphic novels. Common non-fiction categories are: biographies, cookbooks, how-to, self-help, travel, academic/research.

We adore this reading nook by Teal, a teacher in the Pacific North West who shares glimpses of her dreamy reading room, along with book ratings and recommendations.

books by genre

By Author Last Name

Organizing alphabetically may be the easiest way to sort if your bookshelves are used by your entire family, versus by genre—what may feel like sci-fi to you could be considered a thriller by your significant other. And alpha by book title may get confusing when it comes to titles that start with “A” or “The,” so we suggest using author last name.

haslingtonhouse bookshelf

We love the organic flow of this lovely study, designed by Haslington House.

By Most Recently Read

If you’re an avid reader, the easiest way to organize may be chronologically by date read. To begin with, organize your books vaguely by color or size, leaving ample room on the the top and bottom shelves. As you acquire new books, place them on your top shelves in your “to be read soon” location. As you read them, move them to the lower shelves. To keep things further organized, on the lower shelves, you can have three sections:

  • read and loved – keep!
  • read and undecided – keep for now.
  • read and ready to pass along.

Then when you’re ready to donate your used books quarterly or annually, it’s easy to gather the later grouping and make room for new books!

fabriksen

The addition of plants keep this bookshelf by Fabriksen feeling light and bright.

How do you organize your beloved books? Have we missed an organizing hack? We want to hear about it! 

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