Organizing a home library

Miscellaneous General
1

Anyone got any tips for organizing a home library?

I have reference books, history books, economics books, college textbooks, novels, books on entrepreneurship, negotiation, and other business-related books, investment books, and so on. What is the way to organize them? By type (as above), by subject, by author, or a combination of all, or some other method I can’t think of?

I’m stuck, for example, with categorizing Foner’s Give Me Liberty, Zinn’s A People’s History, and Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty. Do I put them under history or college textbooks? Or should I put all my Rothbard books together in a separate section?

Do I put my accounting textbook and business law textbook together with books by Jim Rogers and Benjamin Graham? What about a book by Jack Welch on how he ran GE?

How do I categorize Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, a book on Marxism, or a book on Native Americans?

2

Between me and my brother, we have 1000+ books. He doesn’t really care for organization, but I find organizing by subject to by my preference. Dividing the books into 5 or 10 groups makes it easier to find a book when you’re looking for one.

It’s easier to remember that a book had to do with history, rather than with school or it’s genre.

It’s basically how a library does it, and I prefer it over all other forms.

Sadly, we’re going to be finishing up the basement, and we had to move the books. Most of them are in bins or boxes at the moment : /

3

I’m not near 1000+ books. A couple hundred at most.

4

in a way you will easily find them. so its an individual thing. and the miscellaneous livy and marx you could put in “Misc”

5

I think you will like my answer on this, but you will have to wait until I take pictures for the other thread. I am in the process of moving and not even my whole library is here yet, so I am kind of going through the same thing. I am not using any hard and fast rules, but generally something like this:

  • Old books, various categories because they look cool together

  • Philosophy

  • History

  • Mythology/Anthropology/Sociology

  • Reference

  • Fiction

  • Art/Typography

  • Cookbooks

Then I guess there should be economics separated, but my Austrian component is rather small and half of it is perpetually in use.

6

I watched a video that recommended I sort them into locations. That is, put my computer books next to my computer, my novels next to where ever I relax, my cookbooks in the kitchen, and my socialist books next to the trash bin or the toilet. Seriously, however, I think I might just sort them on the fly. Sort them into groups by how ever they feel natural to me. Kinda what Giant_Joe recommended.

7

This picture is great. Papers and books everywhere.

480×640 88.2 KB

8

Ya, that’s why I organize the way I do. Having easy access to books accessed most often is a good idea, as well. I usually just keep those on my desk.

9

Except that you can count on the fact that there is “method to the madness”.

The way I organised my shelf was, my favorites / the best at eye level… and the less so near the bottom. Classics to most recent. Non fiction and fiction separated. So it’s multi layered, but natural and makes sense… i.e chronological order.

Top shelf

Classics (Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Socrates, Machiavelli) so philosophy mostly —> leads into History of Economic Thought, then Fed and Anti-Fed papers, the law, Human Action, MES → study guides, America’s Great Depression, Economics in One Lesson, (etc), then Political thought, Egalitarianism revolt against nature, many other libertarian / Austrian books…

Second from the top

Two deep.

Back - Classical literature: Tolstoy, MacBeth etc.

Front - Dystopia’s, Liberty orientated (Moon is harsh mistress, Atlas Shrugged, Johnathan livingston Seagull, catch 22, This Perfect Hell, Walden) .. space divider for future growth), then some continuation from the end of the above top shelf, focusing on politics (common sense, revolution: a manifesto, constitution of liberty, for a new liberty, how i found freedom in an unfree world etc.)

Second from the bottom

History (War section mostly from the left, Sun Tzu, A War in Words, Imperial Hubris, first hand counts etc, then it goes into Australian section history, gold mining, settlers, founders → more broader history (Alexander the great, general history book, then Illiad, The Odyssey)

Bottom shelf

More on Australian politics, then Fiction (Robert Ludlum, Matthew Reilly etc)

Basically, I catered to my environment… Best spot for the eyes, best books go there. Easiest access spot, best books go there. Then in chronological order, but what the book is discussing really. And if it’s timeless, then when it was written..

10

Inside my room, I have three bookcases. The one inside my closet is dedicated to the Second World War, and holds almost 100 books. The one next to my bed has all my economics books, and holds only 62 as of now [not including textbooks and economics books I don’t consider “worthy” … “worthy” is a bit loose, since I have Keynes and Stiglitz on my econ. bookcase]. I have one on the other side of my bed dedicated to random books, including all my ancient history books and school books. I have a fourth bookcase outside of my room that is dedicated to older volumes, including two volumes on the history of nations and an eight volume series on Abraham Lincoln. I also have my “unworthy” econ. books there [like my textbooks and some other book my friend gave me, but I never read].