Bookshelf Nerdery, or: in which I put far too much thought into shelf arrangement

Friends! I have a new bookshef, and I’m disproportionally excited about it. The last time I had new shelves to fill was when I moved into my current house, nearly four years ago. Part of the appeal of this flat was the fact that it had embedded wall shelves in the living room, which promised to give me all the space I’d need for a long time to come. I’m sure it won’t come as a shock if I tell you that it took me far less time than expected to fill them up, though.

Since then I’ve been trying to see the fact that I’d nearly run out of shelf space as a positive, since it really makes me think twice before I bring more books into the house. What eventually began to really bother me, though, were not the piles of books that started gathering on the floor — it was the fact that no shelf space meant that there was no rhyme or reason to how I was arranging my books. The piles were mostly made out of books I got at around the same time, and any attempts at thematic arrangement I had going went down the drain.

The most exciting thing about this new bookshelf, then, is that it gave me an excuse to start over. I knew it was going in the living room, where I spend most of my time when I’m at home; the vast majority of my books are in the spare room, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to move books that make me happy to where I can see them all the time. So I moved all my signed books and/or nice editions by favourite authors to the top shelf:


(Kara is looking a little lonely. I might have to get her a friend before too long.)
The middle shelf has non-fiction that’s really important to me, plus a few books I haven’t read yet but think I’ll love when I get to them (this includes recent acquisitions by Maggie Nelson, Adrienne Rich, Rebecca Solnit and Eula Biss). Lastly, the bottom shelf is for the most part a TBR shelf — these are mostly books I’d like to get to in the near future, and I thought that perhaps keeping them in sight would make this more likely.

Finally, all the space I freed up elsewhere allowed me to rearrange those embedded wall shelves. I can’t really do an Ideal Bookshelf for fiction in the same way I did for non-fiction because so many of my copies of life-defining books are still stored at my parents’ (this is the problem with the international moves, and also with an economy that makes it impossible to know whether you’ll stay somewhere long-term). Still, I wanted to see books that make me happy and that matter to me when I look up from my computer, so this is what I ended up with:



This exercise also made me think that I really need to get around to investing in copies of favourite books I don’t own. Can you believe there’s not a single Kristin Cashore in my house?

How do you arrange your home library? Do you shelve by theme, author, size, colour, or none of the above?