Five Ways To Organise Your Bookshelves

Bookshelves: they’re every book lover’s dream to own. Filled to the brim with all our old favourites and also new possible top picks, bookshelves really are like portals to a whole bunch of other worlds.

So, how should you organise your bookshelves? It all comes down to personal preference and what works best for you. Here are five fun ideas to help get you started if you’re lacking inspiration, or if you just want to revamp your shelves!

1. Alphabetically By Author

Perhaps the most well-known method, shelving books by the author’s last name is a common practice used in a number of different places, such as bookstores and libraries. It’s arguably the quickest way to track down a book (if you know the name of the author, of course) and is suited to those that love a straight-forward way of ordering their books. And hey, if you’re someone who loves to be as orderly as possible, you can also sort your favourite author’s work by publication date too.

2. Genre Specific Categories

If you’re someone who reads a whole bunch of different genres, organising your shelves into genre specific categories could be the way to go. It also makes finding a specific type of book easier, and if you’re a mood reader like me, you can head straight to that section of your shelves and pick something, rather than be overwhelmed by all the different books in your collection.

Splitting your books up into different genres is also super handy if you love to recommend books to your family and friends. Your mum loves thrillers? Well you know exactly what thrillers you’ve read and where they are on your shelves, which makes selecting one for her even easier.

3. Rainbow Shelves/Colour Coordinated

Colour coordinated shelves are a big hit with a lot of book lovers, and not just because they are visually appealing to look at. Ever walked into the library or the bookstore and completely blanked on the name of the book you wanted, but remembered that it had a blue cover, or a red spine? Colour coordinated, or ‘rainbow shelves’ could be the answer for you, especially if you associate books with their colours instead of their authors or titles.

Personally, splitting book series up because their spines could be different colours isn’t appealing for me as a book owner, but the overall effect of the rainbow shelves aesthetic is gorgeous!

4. Stylistically: Spines Facing In, Pages Facing Out

Another stylistic way to organise your shelves are by turning all your books around so that the pages are facing out, instead of the spines. The effect is that you’ll see a bookshelf full of pages instead of book titles, which makes selecting a book more of a ‘lucky dip’ type of experience.

Or, if you’re someone with a heap of unread books on your shelves, turn these ‘to be read’ books around so their spines are facing you, but leave all your ‘read’ books with their pages facing out. This clearly shows you which books you have left to read, while putting a stylistic spin on your shelves.

5. Read/To Be Read

And lastly, there’s the option to categorise your books up into ones you have read, and those you are yet to read. You may have seen the acronym ‘TBR’ on sites like Goodreads and other bookish communities. This stands for ‘to be read’—basically, your books that you haven’t read yet, but want to get around to reading. If you are someone with a lot of books on your ‘TBR’, you may want to organise your shelves around this. The basic concept is this: split your shelves up into an ‘already read’ section and a ‘to be read’ section. How you organise these two different sections is up to you, but having a TBR shelf can help you quickly define where those new releases you’ve just bought are, or the back listed titles you’ve yet to get to.

TBR carts have also become popular in the last couple of years, so if you’re someone who doesn’t want to fully commit to a TBR shelf, you can use a portable library cart, or something similar, to keep your books on before adding them to your shelf after you’ve read them. These TBR carts are also super handy for storage since you won’t have random piles of books laying around your house—they’ll be stored neatly on your cart instead.

So those are five different ways you can organise your books. At the end of the day, how someone organises their bookshelves is a personal matter and reflects their preferred organisational method. Remember to have fun with the process and to change it up if your current method isn’t working for you!

How do you like to organise your bookshelves? Tell us in the comments below!