How to Organize Books: Best Home Book Organization Methods

Messy bookshelves make it very difficult to find books, but by taking an afternoon to organize your books, you will find that your home looks neater and you can find the right book when you need to.

How to Organize Books: Commit to a Method

Regardless of how you choose to organize your books, the most important thing is that you stick to the method you decide on. You can't go in just halfway and put away your books in the right place sometime, and on the nearest shelf when you are too busy. Have a spot in your house to put books that need to be re-shelved in their correct locations when you have time.

How to Organize Books: Separate Fiction and Non-Fiction

One of the first distinctions to make (beyond separating children's books from more general adult books, which I assumed was a given) is to separate your books into fiction and non-fiction books. Fiction is defined as anything that was made up by the author, whereas nonfiction incorporates everything from textbooks to encyclopedias, biographies, self-help books, and cookbooks.

How to Organize Books: By Subject or By Author?

Depending on what types of books you have and how you think about them, there are two main methods by which you could organize your bookshelves. The first is to simply organize your books by the author's last name. This method works best if you know the authors of the books you would generally want to find, whether because they are fiction, autobiography, or celebrity political commentary.

If, however, you have a lot of books that you use primarily as sources of information, and you do not know the authors, it would be better for you to organize your books by subject, for example, putting all your books on parenting in one place, and your books on training your dog in another place.

You can even use a combination of both methods by using one for fiction and the other for nonfiction. Another way to use both methods is to sort more deeply into subjects (like romance novels, or religious books), and then organize by author within those subjects.

How to Organize Books: Sort into Appropriate Categories

Once you have decided on your system, sort your books into the categories that you would like to shelf them in, and put them in the order that you would like them to be in. However, do this all on the floor, or on a workspace of some kind because it is much easier to decide what bookcases and shelves to put books on if you can see them all laid out in front of you first.

How to Organize Books: Put Books on Bookshelves

Especially if you have multiple bookcases in different rooms, you will want to arrange your books so as to not have to split a category of books between rooms. To accomplish this, look at your books and assess the shelf space they will require. Organize your books on your shelves in a way that will be logical to you so that you can make sure to follow through with putting them back where they go after you use them.