Late to the Party: How Do Your Organize Your Library? – Bill Ward

For some reason, Bill’s text won’t play nice with the other guests, so I am having to make him sit out on the porch by himself. Seems like fitting punishment. Then again, maybe not, as he may get another great sword and sorcery story written.

Bill Ward: Around a month ago I went through a major overhaul and purge of my collection, something years overdue. Space was definitely becoming more and more of an issue for me as my shelves had come to be packed two or three deep in places (and just what was behind that outer layer?), and stout towers of hardbacks and trades had begun to grow on the floor in front of my bookcases. What shred of organization was left from my last resorting — which happened to be at a time when I bought and installed yet more shelves — was being obscured and diluted by new purchases. What I needed was not only a rethink of where certain things should be shelved, but a culling of the herd.

Anyone with a serious book buying habit knows that, realistically, they will never be able to read everything they buy. It’s a sobering and unwelcome fact that only a fraction of all those great used book finds from the library or thrift store or local indie shop — all those exciting impulse purchases — cannot be gotten to in a normal human lifespan. So, either you become a firm believer that the Singularity will come along and grant you some sort of extended lifespan (possibly turning you into a book-reading cyborg), or you get real and get rid of some of the stuff you’ve accumulated over the years.
For me that meant coming to terms with all the people I was never going to be. I’d never be that guy quoting Aristophanes and Euripides, or the one who rereads the highlighted sections of Seneca and Cicero as part of their bedtime ritual. I’d never get to the massive stack of Ellery Queens gathering dust on my lowest shelf, never grapple with the modern drama or nineteenth century poetry I had squirreled away behind the SF paperbacks. I’d never be the polymath I liked to imagine myself turning into in my twenties when I bought all these books — books bought almost as if to justify the energizing yet fantastical premise that somehow, someway, I’d triumph over time and human nature and read everything.

So, the cardboard boxes came out, divided into ‘cold storage’ and ‘adios’ categories. Cold storage books are borderline, books that I think I may have some use for in the next five years or so but don’t feel should be part of the main collection — these boxes get stacked in closets, or wherever I can find space and don’t have to look at them. The adios pile is further divided into books I think I can resell, and books I plan on giving to Goodwill (our local Goodwill has a pretty thriving book circulation business going on, and is a large part of why I have too many books in the first place). The big goal was to reduce and organize my existing shelves so they didn’t have multiple rows and piles of books on them — in short, to make my shelves look nice, for a change, and to render them more functional.

I tell myself, too, when getting rid of books that should I ever regret their loss, another copy can be easily obtained. And when e-book reader technology settles down and becomes more mainstream (and less proprietary, Amazon and Apple!) I envision another culling, this time to get rid of books that I don’t particularity need to experience as physical objects, or books I don’t like the look of on my shelves. For the reason of freeing up space alone I can see e-books as being a great adjunct to a bibliophile’s collection.

Because space is the issue, in more ways than one. An it isn’t just about having space for the books you want to keep, but space to arrange them logically. Having bookshelves of different sizes and widths limits what can be displayed where — if I want all my books on the US Civil War to go on the same shelf, it has to be on a taller one, to accommodate some of the larger format books I have. But, unlike my books on ancient and medieval history, the Civil War doesn’t fill a whole shelf — so what goes next to them in the space left over? Not having the luxury to leave the shelf blank to ‘grow into,’ I try out some different, related, eras. I have too many books on nineteenth century warfare and colonialism to fit on that shelf, but my stuff on WWI squeezes in OK. But wait, don’t some of these books belong on the other side of the room, in the Military History and Strategy Section? And what of the paperbacks?

It’s more of a logistical nightmare than it seems, at first, and I soon arrived at a point in the proceedings where compromises had to be put in place. So, some of my organization is completely idiosyncratic, and based on the size and format of the book more than other factors (I now have several ‘miscellaneous’ shelves consisting of very rough groupings of smallish trades, bound together by size and the fact that they don’t sensibly fit in elsewhere). What I don’t bother with is alphabetizing, either by title or author. I clump books together by subject and author, but have few large collections of any one author (Gene Wolfe being the exception — his books have recently graduated from having one shelf, to two). Fiction and non-fiction rarely go on the same shelf, with the lone exception of some historical fiction that is filed with its related subject. Similar authors tend to go together — Harold Lamb and Robert E. Howard share a shelf, for example. I also have a shelf, the one nearest to my chair, that is filled with ‘to be read’ items, the books I’d like to get to in the immediate future. Needless to say, it’s pretty full…

Old Betamax shelf makes a great mass market bookcase (c) Bill Ward

I find that I have far more mass market paperbacks than I can adequately shelve. I do have a shelf that is close to perfect for these, a Betamax shelf bought from a local video store in the 80s, when they transitioned away from the old format. Its my longest serving shelf, and holds mass markets nicely, but has nowhere near the space I need for all of them. I’ve taken to stacking extra paperbacks in a few spaces I’ve opened in my other shelves, in rows two deep. A compromise with my ideal, to be honest, but I think that a collection will never achieve any sort of perfect stasis. Book collecting is an ongoing process, and finding space and trying to impose order on a mass of books that posses as much emotional significance as they do intellectual, is a running gunfight fight with entropy, where the only pause exists in order that both sides may reload.

And maybe that’s part of the fun of having so many books in the first place.

Related posts:

1. Inside the Blogosphere: How Do You Organize Your Library?
2. Ramp Up Your Reading: Do It Better by Bill Ward
3. Ramp Up Your Reading: Expand Your Horizons by Bill Ward
4. Ramp Up Your Reading: More and Faster by Bill Ward
5. Bill Ward on the How and Why of Writing Book Reviews