62 or So Ways That People Organize Books in their Private Library
Reid Byers, version of 11-15-2022– Please do not post.
1. by location
This is pretty basic. If you have a separate office and home, or an annex collection, or if you have a summer house on the lake, or a pied-à-terre in gay Paree, you will have separate libraries in each, and this will likely, but not necessarily, be your highest level of classification. The problem goes back at least to Cicero:
Πελληναίων in manibus tenebam et …. Κορινθίων et ΆΘηναίων puto me Romae habere.
I held in hand my Pellenaion, and …. Corinthion and Athenaion I believe I have at Rome.
2. by media
It is also likely, but not certain, that a library is divided by media format. Most people keep their CD collection distinct from their books. But this might not necessarily be the case; a musician might keep CD’s interleaved with books about the appropriate composers and their music. Or a critic might want video tapes, DVD’s, and books kept together for each author.
3. by language
Many private libraries are divided at a high level by the language in which the books are written. On the other hand, especially in non-fiction, foreign-language books may be interleaved with native-language books. The distinction is probably whether the content of the book is more significant than the fact that it is in a specific language.
4. by format/genre
We generally divide literature by format or genre (fiction, poetry, essay, short story collections, drama, etc.). This is a usual division of a private library, but it need not be. It is perfectly reasonable to shelve all of literature in alphabetic order by author, or by author within period or movement.
5. alphabetical by author
This is certainly the most usual of the ways to arrange fiction, poetry, and other forms of literature. It is less frequently used as a high-level distinction for non-fiction, but it is often seen as a way to arrange all subjects at the bottom of their narrowest distinction. A collector’s sub-division might be:
/non-fiction/natural science/entomology/butterflies/alphabetical by author.
6. by subject
Early writers on private libraries often recommended that books be shelved by subject, and except for literature, it seems to be the most natural method. If a book has several subjects, it is best to shelve it under the one that is most important to you. If you can’t decide between two locations, you are the librarian, and you may choose to buy another copy to shelve in the second location. Many of us have multiple copies of books that are important to us.
7. by binding
For binding collectors, the type or period of the binding is the most significant distinction. For many people, the difference between hardcover and paperback is a significant high-level distinction. Some people will only allow hardcover books in their formal library, and I know at least two people who will only buy paperback books.
8. alphabetical by title
This is generally restricted to periodicals, except for the case of books with no known authors.
9. by publishing house
This arrangement is generally seen when the main interest provided by a series of books is their common origin in a significant publishing house. Plantin, Elzevir, Grayson, etc.
10. by period
Period is generally a secondary division within a collected subject heading. Hand weapons: Elizabethan England. The Reformation. The Second World War.
11. by movement
Movement is sometimes a secondary division within a subject heading. Music: Classicism. Romanticism. The Modern.
12. by date of acquisition
Date of purchase is a natural and not uncommon way of organizing books. The books are numbered and cataloged as they are acquired.
13. by date of publication
Publication date is a useful distinction for people for whom the order of the presentation of ideas is significant.
14. by division of read or not read
It can be useful to keep books waiting to be read apart from the rest of the flock. This can imply separate shelving for each of the categories or it can be more extreme. My cousin shelves only unread books and packs away all the books he has read into boxes for storage. And my brother separates critical works he has read straight through from those he skims or uses for reference.
15. by division of liked or not liked
As first blush, this arrangement makes a certain amount of sense. It certainly gives us easier access to our more valued books. On the other hand, it demands the question, “Why not simply get rid of the books we don’t like?” This makes a better weeding distinction than shelving distinction.
16. by date of subject
Shelving by the date of the subject of a book allows for a nice mix of history and period fiction, along with the technologies and social forms of the age. So Jane Austin is shelved with Diderot’s Encyclopédie and Beethoven’s biography.
17. by provenance
Some people shelve at least some of their books provenance. If we have a number of books that once belonged to Benjamin Franklin or Oscar Wilde, the value and interest of their proximity will far outweigh the utility of their being shelved by subject. I have seen two shelves of Marie Antoinette’s books so treated.
18. by color
No, it’s true. Some people do shelve all their books by the color of the spine or wrappers. It is supposed to make it easy to locate a book if you can just remember what it looks like. Its real raison d’être is to provide an attractive visual effect, or to allow all the books within one room to match the décor. A small room lined with fine books all of green leather does have an undeniable panache.
19. by height
It is very common for height to be one of the divisions in a library. Even in the earliest days of libraries in Sumer and Assyria, larger shelves were provided to store larger tablets. Shelving today is often constructed so as to provide more space on the lowest shelf. It is usual to have the bottom shelf contain all the large books that really belong on the shelves directly above it.
It is possible, of course, to shelve all the books in a rigorous order by height. This has some of the effect of shelving all the books by color – if you can remember the physical appearance of the book with sufficient accuracy, you can find it with relative ease.
Whether to shelve some of the books by height or not is one of the most difficult decisions that must be taken in creating a library. On the one hand, it allows for more books to be kept in less space. At the same time, it means that books that belong together are not kept together.
20. by geography
It is possible to shelve books in such a way that their physical position on a large shelf creates a geographical map. At least one travel writer has arranged a wall of books by their relative position of their subject on a map of the United States.
21. by division of whether the book has been censored or not
Each generation must re-defend the right to free speech. This arrangement provides perspective on the struggle.
22. by country
While this order is only used for temporary displays at a public library, it can be a most useful conceit for the private library. All books related to a particular country are shelved together: fiction, essays, poetry, biography, music, history, cookbooks, drama, travel, language, culture, criticism, dictionaries, maps, and books written in that language. The country is generally subdivided by subject. This arrangement provides focus at a cultural and geographical level. If you are considering arranging your library in this manner, you might want to try just one country and live with the arrangement for a while to see how you like it.
One disadvantage is not having a consistent way to deal with the books that are left-over when the bulk of them are sorted by country – books that are not associated with any country, or books that are related to more than one.
23. by country of author
This arrangement would be useful for a scholar tracing patterns of thought or behavior across cultures.
24. by muse
This is an interesting game not least because it provides an opportunity to display a series of appropriate paintings or sculpture. The trick is to provide sufficiently flexible definitions for the domain of each of the muses. Mnemosyne’s girls have the following traditional domains:
Calliope Epic Poetry
Clio History
Erato Love Poetry
Euterpe Music
Melpomene Tragedy
Polyhymnia Sacred Poetry
Terpsichore Dance
Thalia Comedy
Urania Astronomy
So if you happen to by an astrophysicist with a penchant for the poetic arts this may be your ideal classification system. Otherwise, you will have to stretch the definitions to be able to fit many of your favorite books into the system (although it would of course be possible to have just one section of your library devoted to these specific subjects).
25. by trivium and quadrivium
The seven liberal arts (artes liberales) are those branches of knowledge which create free humanity, as opposed to the artes illiberales – the branches of knowledge that simply provide economic gain. They are divided into two groups. The trivium, the first to be studied, was understood as elementary (hence trivial). It included grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The quadrivium, the advanced study, consisted of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
Taken together, the seven liberal arts constitute a tempting set of criteria for dividing our books, but they have the same limitations as do the Nine. There are simply not enough appropriate categories for use in a modern library unless we are willing to extend the meaning of some of them. And perhaps we just do not take astronomy seriously enough these days.
26. Organically
This is a process rather than an organization, but it produces an organization. We begin with the collection in any arrangement, but whenever a book reminds us of another, we immediately shelve it beside that book. Over time, our collection moves to an arrangement that reflects our mental map of reality. Fun, too.
27. by gravitational attractors
There are some writers of such stature that they exert an inexorable attraction upon other volumes on our shelves. Shakespeare draws all things to himself, but in our library he might particularly draw Elizabethan literature and history to his shelves. Byron might frame the Romantic movement. Tolkien can head saga, epic, language, and myth as well as sword-and-sorcery fiction. The attractors do not have to be the greatest literary figures of all time, but rather those writers whose work seems to touch many of our other favorites.
28. by illustrator
If your chief motivation for buying certain books is the illustrator, it simply makes sense to shelf them together by illustrator. Many important collections of graphic art are arranged this way, and it can make for some interesting shelf-fellows.
29. by the book I was writing at the time
Because writers assemble temporary working collections for the production of new material, and because that assembly of books constitutes a substantial piece of work, some people find they like to make permanent those temporary collections.
30. by collections and books that just happen
There is a clear distinction in the mind of many a collector between books that are intentionally bought as part of a specific collection and all the other books that we buy just because we want them.
31. random and cataloged
As long as the collection is cataloged, there is no real necessity for the books to be kept in any particular predetermined order. As long as they are kept in a particular shelf location, they can be located by any cataloged criterion and can be searched in any order. This arrangement does not however permit of our directed exploration of the collection, nor browsing by subject, and finally it seems to be a great waste.
32. random, uncataloged
On the other hand, a completely random library has an undeniable attraction. Perverse as it may be, it is full of surprises and, if of sufficient size, fairly guarantees us unexpected delights any time we glance over the shelves. It of course precludes using the library for productive work, since it will be very difficult to put our hand on a book when it is actually wanted. But the satisfaction of browsing through such strange and surprising lands may be for some an overwhelming intoxication. Such an unorganized collection is not, strictly speaking, a library.
33. by passionate subjects
Many of us have particular subjects about which we are passionate but which have borders sufficiently indistinct as to prevent us from using any standard classification. For example, the shelves we think of as the Sea might include books on navigation, naval architecture, yachting, yarns, customs and usage, battles, pirates, strategy, marine biology, and meteorology, as well as Jack Aubrey, Moby Dick, Ahab’s Wife, Pepys’ Diary, and a full half of our travel books, among others.) We might compose our whole library of such sections, or have only one or two, with the rest of the library in a more traditional arrangement.
34. by Barnes and Noble’s categories
Bookstores arrange their books differently from libraries, and for different reasons. But the arrangements they derive do reflect the buying patterns of many of us, and it is not wholly unreasonable to consider organizing our books in similar ways. The recent division of our local B&N had these high-level divisions:
Cooking Fiction
Art Performing Arts
Business Travel
Science Children’s
Computers Music
35. in parallel with local supplier
You might for the sake of convenience choose to use your local bookseller’s arrangement.
36. by number of pages
It is possible to arrange books by length. It would, presumably, be useful if you were browsing for a quick read or for a nice long summer novel. It should put damn fat books at the end.
37. by ISBN
This is roughly equal to arranging by date of publication.
38. by price
We could choose to organize our books by their original price (to study the development of value), by purchase price (to emphasize our cleverness at finding a bargain), or by current value (for our personal satisfaction).
39. by Bacon’s faculties
Francis Bacon divided his books according to three faculties:
the function of memory history (natural, civil, literary, ecclesiastical)
the function of reason philosophy (including Theology)
the function of imagination poetry, fable, etc.
40. by division of new, used, or collectable
Though this arrangement sounds more a book seller than a private library, it may make sense to some of us to shelve in these three categories. It has the benefit of keeping in separate spaces the most valuable books as well as the newest (and most likely unread).
41. by the πίνακες
The Pinakes, the divisions used by head librarian Callimachus for the great Library of Alexandria, were a combination of genre and subject matter classifications: epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, natural science, medicine, mathematics, rhetoric, law, and miscellany (Pfeiffer, 127 ff). This arrangement was used in a great many libraries over the next 1500 years.
42. by degree of enjoyment
This arrangement would in principle allow us to choose wonderful books quickly. At the same time, it seems that it would take a great deal of time to shelve even a few books. How could one gauge the relative value of one’s favorite thousand books? This is one of the categories that Petroski suggests in The Book on the Bookshelf, and in which we are tempted to believe he is kidding us a bit.
by obfuscatory arrangements
Petroski also suggests some of the following arrangements, which are probably just for fun, but which might be useful if there were some pressing need to conceal the classification of our books while still making it possible to locate them with some ease:
43. by author’s first name
44. by opening sentence
45. by reverse spelling of penultimate word
46. by number of entries in the index
Color or height might do just as well, of course.
by a standard classification scheme
While a full classification scheme is not often appropriate for a private library, it may make sense in cases where there are a great many books and where the books are divided among many subjects. Even in a relatively modest library it can make sense to organize books by the higher-level divisions of one of the systems. I have seen a library with less than 3000 books arranged loosely according to Dewey. Many people simply have it stuck in their brains.
A full classification system is a lot of work and only worth the trouble for a lot of books, but if we find it desirable, it might make sense to choose the same scheme as that of our local public or academic library. Here are some of the important ones:
47. by DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification)
This is Dewey itself. It is important because it is everywhere, not because it is the most appropriate or useful system for libraries today. It is in use in 135 countries, even though it is heavily biased toward the United States of the Victorian era.
48. by LCC (Library of Congress Classification)
This is the most widely used system for serious academic libraries, especially in major universities. And in one of the two largest libraries in the world.
49. by UDC (Universal Decimal Classification)
This was adapted from the DDC as an intentionally multi-lingual system. First made available in French, it is now in use around the world. If you have books in many languages, you probably should consider UDC seriously.
50. by BC2 (Bliss, or Bibliographic Classification)
Bliss is the most important fully faceted classification system, a system whose vocabulary is “organized rigorously into clearly defined and easily grasped categories”. This allows precise, yet brief, specification of categories, so that “… the class of a work on the nurse as a caregiver for terminal patients and their families is exactly represented by the classmark HPK PEY FBG K.”
51. by Colon Classification
The first faceted classification system, created by the brilliant Indian information scientist S. R. Rananathan. Widely used in India and a great break-through in 1933.
52. by Cutter’s Expansive Classification
Cutter’s system, roughly contemporary with Dewey’s, has the great advantage of being based on a series of “expansions”, beginning with a classification scheme for a one-room library, and expanding, in stages, up to the largest institutions. The smallest expansion is as follows:
A Reference and generalia
B Philosophy and Religion
E Biography
F History, Geography, Travel
H Social Sciences
L Natural Science and Arts
Y Language and Literature
YF Fiction
The third expansion has twenty-six base categories and is intended for a substantially larger library. There are seven expansions in all. A system so flexible might be a good model for a private system.
53. by Brown’s Subject Classification
This system allowed for the simple insertion of new divisions when they were needed (a problem with Dewey), and it might have been very successful if its support had not flagged early on.
54. by the Blegen Library Classification
Used at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece
55. by the Cambridge Library Classification
For the library of the University, in aeternum floreat.
56. by the NLM (National Library of Medicine Classification)
This classification system is a medical extension of the LC system. It is a good illustration of how a specialized system can be used with a more general system. It uses notation schedules that are permanently excluded from the LC classification.
57. by the Schiller Classification System
This is a specialized system in use at the Law Library of Columbia University. Specialized systems can be devised for any discipline, or any collection, for that matter.
58. division by general/special classification
These classification systems are exhaustive of a special field but are light on everything else. Such a system might be devised for a private library collection with a strong specialization. If you should find yourself considering designing your own specialized system, it will be very important to do some deep reading on classification beforehand. The standard text is Wynar, Introduction to Cataloging and Classification.
59. division by special classification
This system uses a specially designed scheme that is exhaustive of a special field, and uses another classification system for everything else.
60. by Aristotle’s arrangement
If you are a prolific writer, the great man’s system will be attractive. He arranged in three classes:
the exoteric: his own writings intended for the public
the esoteric: his own writings intended for the school (the Lyceum)
and
everybody else’s writings.
61. by artsy arrangements
You can arrange books so that their subjects rhyme with their placement. Astronomy books can be placed on the highest shelf in the house. Travel books can be shelved as far from the library as possible. You get the idea.
62. as jokes
There are famous shelves that consist only of books whose titles are likely to crack up an unsuspecting visitor. These shelves are sometimes positioned so the visitor sees them just as they are leaving. Things like:
The Romance and Tragedy of Banking
Knitting with Dog Hair
Essay on Silence
Teach Yourself Alcoholism
Boy Scouts Pathfinders – The Strange Hunt for the Beaver Patrol
My Invisible Friend Explains the Bible
GI Nun
These are books that we collect over an entire lifetime. They may have been serious when they were published. We can only hope so. You know what’s funny; don’t hesitate when you find one.
63. arranging for weeding or deacquisition
Because of the lack of buffer space, it can be very difficult to sort a fully packed library, but that is the condition that the library is most likely to be in when the decision is finally taken to get rid of some of the books. To sort the books in situ, do it by shelf. Shelf-read the library, shifting the books that are candidates for disposal to the extreme right side of their shelf, with an acid-free card separating them from the keepers on the left side. Once the whole room is sorted, you can get a good visual impression of the effect that your proposed deacquisition will have.
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Should you find other arrangements being used in a private library, please send them to me on the contact page.