So help me, I did it...

[telophase]

...I organized all my books by color.

Well, not all of them - the paperbacks were just too much for me, especially as I have to double-stack them because I don't have enough shelf space*, so it's all the hardbacks and most of the trade paperbacks. No way in hell was I going to do the manga - just enough of them had different color books in each series that I didn't want to break the series up, and I need to organize those by No Longer Collecting/Finished and Still Collecting anyway, to minimize the amount of reshuffling I have to do when acquiring new manga.

It was hard, because I had to rearrange all the books I own and move the manga to a different set of bookcases, which I had to first clean off all the piles of random crap that had been sitting there waiting for me to clean them off for over a year. And don't even get me into things like figuring out where brown books should go and if a book was white, yellow, or tan, etc. (I did them in Roy G Biv order, which means a light tan book is going to look odd no matter where it's placed. I arbitrarily decided brown was a color between orange and yellow.)

Anyway, it looks nifty and there was an odd effect that I hadn't expected. I've got three different styles of bookcases, which has always bugged me because they're all slightly different sizes and they look horrible together.** But reshelving the books by color takes the focus completely off the cases and puts it on the books, and you don't notice that the bookcases are all different.

And then I took a hot bath with a Lush bath bomb in it, and watched the Miss America pageant because it required absolutely no brainpower. I was pulling for Miss Washington as her last name indicated she was at least part Japanese, and I don't think there's ever been an Asian Miss America, plus she nailed her song and was generally a happy, bubbly person, but she only got 2nd runner-up. Ah well.

I did a lot of work today. I'm going to hurt like hell tomorrow.



[Poll #1132668]




* And I hate that all the bookshelves I own are deep enough to do this, because I hate double-stacking books, but I hate wasting the space with one wimpy little row of paperbacks even more.

** Don't bother mentioning you don't care about that. The point is, I do.

Comments

books!

[shusu.livejournal.com]

This is the coolest idea I've heard all year. *ponders*

Re: books!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

If you've got a visual enough memory to remember the general idea of what a book looks like, and it doesn't bother you to look through a lot of books when you need to find one, it's not a bad deal. :D

I'm just sort of awed at how green seems to be the identifying color for language books.

Here's an article on it. (http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2008/01/25/organizing-bookshelves-by-color/) This isn't where I heard of it first, though: I read an article about a used bookstore doing it for a week as an art project a year or so back. :D

Re: books!

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I have found myself looking for a book that I know has a green cover only to realize that it is blue.

I'm still sort of tempted to do it though.

Re: books!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I expect for many of them I'll remember the primary color of the cover, instead of the spine. But as I had no sorting order before, this won't be any different than searching for books then. XD

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I picked not-green because I seem to remember reading somewhere that green was a color associated with sickness. Maybe it was around the time of Half-blood Prince?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I've got more green books than I expected. Although, not surprisingly, a lot of them seem to be the O'Reilly computer manual blue-green. XD

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

You are one with the cutting-edge folks at Adobe Books (http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=%22san+francisco%22+adobe+bookstore+color&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi).

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I knew I'd heard of a bookstore doing this before! XD

[badnoodles.livejournal.com]

Mine are sorted by genre: Sci-Fi, Embarassing, and Impressive. The Embarassing ones are all on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in my bedroom. Or in some cases, in a cardboard box in my closet labeled "old sheets", so no one goes poking around in it.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Heh. I resort to the double-stacked paperbacks to hide the Embarassing ones.*




* Mercedes Lackey's first two trilogies, mainly. They're awful, but I get swept up in my angsty teenage self who loved them at 16 when I reread them, so I can't quite bring myself to get rid of them.

[chibicharibdys.livejournal.com]

I fear that if I sorted mine by color, it would be brown, black, and gray.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

That would be my clothes. XD

[chisotahn]

Mmm Lush! What kind of bath bomb? I tried their Karma bath bar recently and was suitably pleased.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I don't remember its name, but it had little bits of cocoa butter in it. :D

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

My closet is arranged by color (rainbow order). I like the way my clothes look all hanging there like that. Books, however, are organized by how tall they are and if they fit the shelf or not :D

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I did have to give my largest coffee-table books their own shelf underneath the cookbooks. And a few of the next-largest books got reclassified from, say "red" to "orange-red" to get put on the shelf below if it was larger. :D Most of my shelves are pretty tall, though.

I don't have enough clothes that are colored significantly brighter then black and brown to be worth organizing by color. :D And at the moment I only have three shirts hanging up, and the rest all fit in my dresser. Which is, itself, shoved in the closet because I hate random pieces of furniture up against walls. Um, I'm sort of weird that way.

I'd have more hanging up, except that with the weight loss I had to get rid of all my previous clothes and while I've bought a lot more, I don't currently have any dressy clothes that are worth hanging up. :D

[awamiba.livejournal.com]

You must share photos with us! :)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'll try to remember to take them tonight. :D

[kintail.livejournal.com]

Sounds so awesome! I want to try it on my very disorganized shelves (result of unpacking too quickly + can't be arsed figuring out A System) when I am finished dying of this plague cold of doom.

I love sorting things by colour to make a spectrum, but I always got stumped by white/tan/brown, too. I usually tend to go with something like Tan-Brown-ROYGBIV-Black-Grey-White but I'm always tweaking it, depending on the actual colours I'm working with.

Pictures please! (And maybe some Kittyspam, too?)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'll try to remember to take photos tonight. :)

I think this may be easier to keep control of than my usual subject/author-based system, as it doesn't require doing anything but finding the approximate color the spine is and shelving it. And a misshelved book stands out. XD

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

We need photos!

I was rooting for Miss Washington in Miss America, too. Actually, I was rooting for Miss Vermont and Miss Alaska, who were on the reality show they did, but they both got cut before the pageant even started.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I had, of course, my nominal rooting for Texas, but Miss Texas was especially forgettable this year, so I wasn't rooting too hard. :D

[(Anonymous)]

I'm curious, so who actually won?

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

Oh, foo. That comment was mine.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Hee. :D

I don't actually remember who won ... although I suspect my mighty Google-fu can tell me.

Here we are ... Miss Michigan (http://blog.mlive.com/chronicle/2008/02/miss_america_returning_to_musk.html).

BB-ROYGBV-GW

[amberley.livejournal.com]

Neat!

Or there's always the resistor color code (http://wiki.xtronics.com/index.php/Resistor_Codes) order: Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Gray, White.

Do you organize them further within colors, either by shade, Pantone#, author or subject, or size? Or is it easy enough to find the right one by scanning through everything of one color?

In Henry Petroski's excellent book about books and storage The Book on the Bookshelf (http://www.amazon.com/Book-Bookshelf-Henry-Petroski/dp/0375706399/) he mentions a historical figure who sorted his books by size because that led to the most efficient shelving.

Photos would be excellent!

Re: BB-ROYGBV-GW

[telophase.livejournal.com]

If I'd been aware of the resistor color code, I'd probably have done that - although light tan is always going to look odd. XD Too much effort to shift now, though.

The only organizing I did within one color was to, for example, put the green-blue books closer to the green books and the purple-blue books closer to the purple. Given that there'd been no organization previously other than "mostly fiction in this case" and "mostly nonfiction in this case" and "if not there, try bedroom or one of the stacks on the floor," this will probably streamline me finding books overall.

[sleary.livejournal.com]

I double-stack my paperbacks too. I put the back row on crappy homemade risers so I can see the spines, but it's still annoying. I'm going to get a couple of Benno towers (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/07305310) and see how that goes -- they're only about six inches deep, and I have a bit of unused wall space between a door and a window that's just wide enough for two.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I'll have to look at those when I move. What I really want is a few of the Billy cases with doors (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S59838021) to hide stuff, and it looks like the Benno tower goes with Billy cases. XD

My manga is on Styrofoam risers, and double-stacked - the series that are either finished or that I stopped buying but still don't want to get rid of are stacked on the risers, with the active series in front.