For the love of books

Like many booklovers, my capacity for buying books rather exceeds my bookshelves' capacity for storing them. Combine this fact with a husband who is also a book hoarder and far too many house moves, and the result is bookshelves which are a jumble of genres with an almost total lack of order and reason. As an example, one shelf behind the sofa currently houses children's fiction, biography, classics, whodunnits, Japanese fiction, and more. Other than the Terry Pratchetts, the only books which are actually sorted properly are my Swedish novels - from just 12 books a decade ago, I now have two and a half shelves of them, but as my treasured collection which I have been carefully and keenly growing, they are well nurtured! Sorted alphabetically by author, series shelved together and in order, they set the standard that I'd love to apply to the rest of our books.

Part of the issue is trying to decide how and where to start. All proper libraries of course have a classification system, whether it's by genre, topic, dewey decimal code, or an individual in-house method. Both my high school library and our town library, like many others, had fiction books shelved alphabetically by author, and non-fiction by Dewey Decimal Classification, so I'd never really considered other ways of arranging books. Bookshops obviously have different systems, generally based around genrification, so books on a particular topic on in a certain genre will be grouped together. In fact, one of our local bookshops takes this a step further than most I've encountered, and shelves foreign fiction with books about its country of origin - so for example 'scandi noir' novels are found cover to cover with travel guides for Norway and Sweden!

The bigger or more specialised the collection, the more detailed the classification system generally needs to be. Libraries in academic settings - the English Faculty Library at Oxford, or a theological college's library - may have their own in-house systems which allow them to catalogue and shelve books in ways which are more helpful to their users than a system for more general purposes. Most if not all standard classification systems offer ways of adding more detail, by adding suffices of letters, numbers or symbols, but these can get rather unwieldy, and in cases where they're not applied in a consistent order, could cause confusion.

I'm definitely inclined to apply some sort of genrification when (if!) I can finally come to terms with the idea of hefting large amounts of books from one room to another. Children's fiction, cosy crime, general fiction, book club books (yes I know that's not actually a genre, but it's my personal library so I can make it up!), classics, travel, nature writing, history - and probably 'other' due to my occasionally eclectic selections (yes, Norwegian Wood, I'm looking at you here!) Maybe I should start by suggesting to my Beloved that the bookcase in the hall which currently has the (almost) full Terry Pratchett set (missing only the biography and a short story collection which are... somewhere in the living room. Or maybe upstairs), and the 'complete' Game of Thrones series - that bookcase could accommodate at least some of the other fantasy/scifi books which I'm currently gradually evicting from the Swedish bookshelf in the living room. Hmmm, there could be mileage in this...! And making space on that unit in the living room would allow for more nice booknooks, as well as the books themselves... I might really be onto something here!