In the last months of 2022, I had, for various reasons, occasions to move a lot of my books around. I could get into the whys and the wherefores, the reasons and the inciting incidents, but the important thing is this: I highly recommend this process.
Put your hands on your books. All of them. Are you sure you know what’s in there?
The reason for moving all the fiction was simple: The bookshelves overflowed and needed to be expanded. I looked forward to this process for the weeks it took for more shelving to arrive. I would sit with my morning coffee and think, I get to rearrange you soon at the shelves.
With a little more room up top, I moved everything up, trying to leave just a little space at the end of each shelf for the books I knew would be added before too long (and a lot of room in the Ws, because Chuck Wendig’s big chonky Wayward is in my TBR pile). I dusted and tidied and only found one dead spider along with all the cat fur. Now, everything is lined up neatly; everything belongs where it is. And I want it all to be there. There wasn’t anything about which I thought, Well, this can go in the discard pile. It was a deeply satisfying feeling.
Pulling down and replacing every book on your main shelves can be a kind of ritual, a trip down memory lane that reminds you, in brief flashes and long reveries, how you got to where you are. It’s turning to the back of a book to find the name and semester of the class it was read for, scratched lightly in pencil in the back cover. It’s remembering which books were purchased in which cities; which were gifts; which you have duplicates of, in case a friend needs them. (If you don’t hoard duplicates of your favorites, this is another thing I recommend.)
Every time I’ve moved, I’ve gotten rid of books, for better or for worse. Rearranging is also seeing where the holes are, and considering whether they need filling. What do you miss? What library reads do you wish you had your own copies of? Which books were lent out, never to return? Should you replace them?
Take the books off the shelves. Dust them, thumb through them, find yourself surprised about what you do and don’t remember. Line them up however you like—by size, by color, by author, by vibes—and then, when everything you’ve read is sorted, tackle the real challenge.
The unread books.
When our holiday plans went awry, I did what any sensible book collector would do in my place: I spent Christmas Eve piling every single book from the unread books bookcase onto the dining room table, dusting them, considering them, and deciding their fates.
I look at these books all the time, but touching them, moving them around, deciding how to put them back (on which shelf? in which order?) is something entirely different. The unread books have been piling up for at least two decades—a sentence which is worrying yet inevitable when a person has been a reader since a very young age. Some of those aging books are still things I want to read. And some, inevitably, are not.
Taking all the books down was a chance to organize and cull, but primarily, it was an experience in simply remembering what was there, how it got there, and why. You can look at shelved books until the cows come home, but it’s not the same as actually taking them off the shelves. Any bookstore browser can tell you this: Looking is one thing, handling another. I could look at that shelf every day and still discover, in the reorganizing, that I’d forgotten something—a book tucked behind another, one in the back corner behind the cat tree, something with a small spine that just didn’t stand out.
I’d forgotten I had Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower. I put all the Catherynne Valente books together and was alarmed at how behind I am (I’ve still read as many of her books as I own unread ones, but she has written a lot of books). I piled up the books about work and life and jobs and balance; I made another stack of sort-of fairytale/folklore-y novels. One stack is “books by people I at least sort of know and should definitely have read by now.” Another is nature-y books. There is a lot of -ish and -like and kinda in these stacks. They are themes, not categories.
Buy the Book
City of Bones
This is where I indulge my chaos. The unread books had been sorted into nonfiction and fiction, but that felt too rigid. The SFF piles needed shuffling, new books next to old, The World We Make waiting there for me right by Assassin’s Fate (I’m still not ready). All the shelving habits in which I do not indulge for the read books get indulged in the unreads: size, theme, mood, basically anything but color. (Nothing against color! I’m just never happy with it.)
I can’t tell you how many treasures I found, how many impulse purchases or neglected gifts or long-forgotten books seemed to take on new life as I stacked and sorted and restacked. My pile of Australian fiction that I meant to read when I got back from a friend’s wedding! All the Annie Dillard books I’ve been meaning to read! The Only Good Indians, still under consideration in the “Will it be too scary for me?” category!
Even if you don’t have twenty years’ worth of unread books, sorting through those you do have can be an effective way to remember why you picked them up in the first place. It might move new books to the top of the pile. It also might move some books out of the pile altogether.
Because that, of course, was part of the point. The books were double-stacked. It was too many. I had to let some go. And if you’re aghast at the idea of getting rid of books you haven’t read yet, I understand. They are all potentials, all things you might yet love. But books, like anything, have their time, and they have their time in your life. That essay collection that felt so vital in 2018 now feels like something from another era. Books bought on impulse in the 2000s are tweens and teens now, and some of them don’t resonate the way they once did. Some do! And some feel a little bit like unnecessary anchors, things weighing you down, distracting from what you really want to be reading.
It’s okay to not want to read something any more. (It might come back to you later anyway, if you really need it.) It’s okay to narrow down, to clear out, to freshen up—bookshelves as much as anything else. The things that are leaping out at me from the rearranged bookcase feel different—looser, brighter, lovelier. I want to read them all at once. First, I need to finish the book I bought for a book group three months ago. The one I had entirely forgotten until I found it wedged between hardcovers on the unread shelf.
Originally published January 2023.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
I spent an afternoon cataloguing fifty or sixty cases of books last weekend. A chosen few went home with me to book cases with strategically located empty shelves, all of which were in the wrong part of the alphabet for the books in cases. So, to add another 20 percent of books, I had to move about 80 percent of my MMPB library.
Previously, I added an extra two columns of shelves in the only available space, which was to the left of my collection. So, lots of room for authors towards the beginning of the alphabetic. Unfortunately, the books to be shelves all were by authors beginning with S….
Good news! I located a Judy-Lynn del Rey I misshelved in 1996.
Everytime I’ve rearranged my bookshelves, I ended up reading a book & having piles of books left on the floor
“What shall I do with all my books?” was the question; and the answer, “Read them,” sobered the questioner. But, if you cannot read them, at any rate handle and, as it were, fondle them. Peer into them. Let them fall open where they will. Read on from the first sentence that arrests the eye. Then turn to another. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas. Set them back on their shelves with your own hands. Arrange them on your own plan, so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances. If they cannot enter the circle of your life, do not deny them at least a nod of recognition.
—Winston Churchill, from Thoughts and Adventures, p.318
I’m cleaning 40 years of stuff out of the basement so I can add more shelves for books, so I can stop double-stacking and have room for expansion. Exciting! I’m almost there!
Rearranging my bookshelves is so tedious that I usually put off doing it until I have accumulated a large number of new books. Then I tackle it all on one day. I arrange by last name of the author, so I have to take down pretty much the entire set of books to reorder them.
One evening while shuffling my books around a couple of months ago I’d decided to add some extras to a pizza I was about to put in the oven. I’d just taken the jar of olives out of the fridge when all the muscles in my forearm went “Nope, not gripping anything else today”, though they did subsequently agree to pick up the bits of broken jar and I haven’t found any more shrivelled olives in odd corners recently…
Due to a lack of space and worsening eyesight, I’m getting rid of lots of real books. As I sort through the boxes, I’m getting a great trip down memory lane, and also realizing where I need to acquire something in ebook format, so it’s available to me even when the ‘real’ book is gone.
For a while, I was organizing my fiction books by how well I thought the characters would get along with each other. I think that was a result of watching too many of those old Warner Bros “books come to life” cartoons.
Interesting, helpful post! I need to do this again soon; some of mine are double-stacked. I do have a shelf of deserted island books (books I’d have to have wherever!) which include Surprised By Joy and The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.
I’ve had enough rearranging my physical books. I’m slowly donating them, and moving to ebooks due to my eyesight. But then again, I’m now volunteering at the library and I get to rearrange LOTS of books, and most of them are nice hardbacks I didn’t usually collect.
God, I love rearranging and adding to my shelves.
A tip: for my Unread books, I just shelve them with all the others, but pull it out an inch or two so that I can easily tell what hasn’t been read.
@11 – What if someone with OCD visited you and, while you were distracted, straightened all your books for you? :D
A dear friend and I have a longstanding desultory debate regarding the various merits of shelving vs. piling. My take is that shelving to-be-read books allows for random access, when you have no idea what you might be needing to read next; while piling as-finished-as-I’m-gonna books preserves at least temporarily a chronological record of the order in which books were set down.
“I get to rearrange you soon” <— me
I absolutely love sorting books. I’ve mentioned before, maybe on this post’s original publication, that I’m one of the savages who mostly shelves unread books with the rest, at least in part to keep series together but also because it just helps keep track of what I have; I do often pull ones to be read soon out slightly like Dean B. @11, though.
As someone with a small apt, I have found i really dont lose anything by donating unread books that exceed my shelves. As long as I make a list or take a pic of the spines, i have the title and author. Almost any book, even many out of print, can be found through a library, even if you have to do an inter-library loan.
I often wonder what will become of my library when I’m gone – will my children assume the hefty task of preservation? The issue is crucial in an age of universal belief in the permanence of e-books, wikis and the “democratic” internet, despite growing signs of authoritarian censorship and the destruction of public libraries. The internet is well on the way to becoming little more than a vehicle for advertising and disinformation. Dementia’s memory loss precludes Fahrenheit 451’s solution. Will my life’s collection of great and lesser works become evidence of subversion, jeopardising the health and freedom of my descendants? I think I’ll write a novel about this!
Another lovely piece of writing, your work is always the highlight of a visit to this website. Thanks, Molly. I’m about to move for the first time in 17 years and am actually looking forward to handling all of my books again as well as deciding how to arrange them in my new (old) home. It will be like spending time with the best company imaginable.
These days I do about 95% of my reading on Kindle. Which does not, of course, prevent me from buying physical books, adding them to my LibraryThing catalog, and occasionally having to go back and interfile all of the new acquisitions. (I keep everything shelved by author’s last name (with specific exceptions), just so that I can actually _find_ anything.)
EDIT: And I keep nonfiction separate from fiction, and cookbooks get their own shelves.
For various reasons, another person helped me sort/shelve my books this year. It was very helpful because it actually happened (@2, I also live this way!) but I do occasionally run across situations like Little Lord Fauntleroy (shelved as it should be this time around in the Historic Fiction section) next to Curse of the Spellmans (a clear tenant of the Mystery section, esp. since that’s where other books in the series are) next to Brain on Fire (nonfiction memoir). Or The Lovely Bones in the midst of my P.G. Wodehouses. It’s a little jarring, but there is something nicely cross pollinating about it. Sometimes I move them, sometimes I don’t.
So beautifully put… captured it all and normalized my guilty pleasure of book rearranging..thank you for this gift of guilt removal!!!
I used the social distancing period to sort out the entire collection. The to-be-read pile has a dedicated bookcase (now overflowing into the hall) with the dystopian fiction I just can’t face at the moment kept separate. Speculative fiction, defined fairly broadly, was separated from the rest and placed in alphabetical order (with some tweaks for anthologies and collections). Non-fiction, which was a mess, was Deweyed (even my librarian girlfriend, with a bigger collection than mine, although she has been collecting for longer, often with a bigger budget, noted that not even she knows anyone else who has Deweyed their private collection), and everything labelled accordingly which, even with the help of the British Library Catalogue, took longer than expected.
In retrospect, I think I should have used LoC. Dewey has too many limitations especially, at least for my purposes, in natural history, although I think if I were more interested in religions there would have been even more grumbling.
I now have a fair idea what’s on the shelves and where. I don’t think I will need to do this job again for a while, thankfully.
@8 Russell H: If that was the way you organized your bookshelf, I highly recommend Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, if you haven’t already read it.