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Smiling Shelves

Literary Love - Organizing My Library

2/12/2014

4 Comments

 
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To celebrate Valentine's Day, I'm joining up with the Literary Love party happening at the blogs shown above. Who needs sappy Valentine's love, when you've got book love to post about? :)
So here's the moment when I confess my love for a kind of nerdy thing. I love organizing my library. I've got a lot of books (don't we all?). For years, my library was less than organized. Occasionally a series will end up sort of close to each other. Books by the same author might be on the same bookshelf if they're lucky. But I always knew where to find any book I was looking for. My system worked.
Then I got married. And moved. I certainly couldn't leave any of my books behind (okay, I may have given away 5 or 6). I packed up 27 boxes of books to move. Then I had to figure out how to put them on my shelves.
This was so much fun!
I ended up with a music shelf, travel shelves, shelves for old books, shelves for new books, and an entire bookcase dedicated to my favorite books.

And then two years passed.

The shelves became less organized, since I am constantly acquiring new books. Which meant that in November, it was time for a revamping. I piled all of the books I had accumulated so far in 2013. It was a pretty big pile.
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Then I had to organize and reorganize, move things around, group by author on one shelf, move them to another shelf because I couldn't fit them all there, and give in to the idea of laying a few sideways on top of others because that was where they belonged but I just couldn't squeeze another book onto that shelf!

It was a glorious Saturday afternoon, and I look forward to repeating it soon in the future!

So there is my literary love confession, nerdy though it may be. What literary love of yours are you celebrating this week? Feel free to tell me in a comment, or link up your post at Doing Dewey, Estella's Revenge, From Isi, or Love At First Book!
4 Comments
Rebecca - Love At First Book link
2/13/2014 03:02:08 am

Yay for Literary Love 14!!! :D

Ummmm your book stacks just make me want to turn sideways and read all of your titles!!! And I can't imagine giving away too many books, but recently I've come to terms with keeping only the books I LOVE and releasing the rest to better homes.

Reply
Julie @ Smiling Shelves link
2/13/2014 01:11:44 pm

Good for you, Rebecca! I'm more in the buy-any-book-that-I-might-want-to-read-someday stage. I'm sure I'll get to the stage you're at sometime, but I'm not ready for that yet!

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Jade @ Bits & Bobs link
2/13/2014 07:02:35 am

27 boxes of books?! Wow, I would have been in organisation heaven!! Having shelves that are in a particular order that works for you always makes for better navigation around your collection.
:-)

Reply
Julie @ Smiling Shelves link
2/13/2014 01:13:34 pm

I have to admit, I really did love packing and unpacking and organizing those 27 boxes. I wish I could find the picture I took of the books spread out all over the floor. It was quite the project to get them all on the shelves! :)

Reply



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    My name is Julie, and I own a lot of books. As in, they are stacked on the floor because I've run out of room on the shelves. And those shelves? There are so many books on them that they smile -- not sag; smile. This blog will cover book reviews and all manner of other bookish things.

    You can contact me at julie@smilingshelves.com.

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