We all have our preferred way of organizing our bookshelves. The most common way is to alphabetize books by the author’s last name. After all, it’s how libraries shelf their fiction books, so why shouldn’t we, right? It definitely comes in hand to keep a book series together.

A trend I’ve seen many times on Bookstagram is organizing books by color. I appreciate the people who take the time to do this, because it seems more tedious than doing them alphabetically. This isn’t a way I would organize my own books, I’m definitely an ‘alphabetical by author’ person – I always have been. It’s probably because that’s how I saw books at the library when I was a kid, so I went with it in my teenage/adult life.

Some bookworms also like to keep hardbacks and paperbacks separate, and I get it, because the sizing is different and all that. For a while I did this as well (with the alphabetization) but when I moved a couple of years ago, I found it easier with my new, shorter bookshelves to just be like the library I work in and let chaos by chaos with sizing, and stick strictly to alphabetization.

Now, for non-fiction.

Libraries have their preferred choices of the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress classifications to organize their books. Mine (and those all around me) use DDS. So, when I moved, I decided to order my non-fiction books by the Dewey Decimal System as well. It takes a little more, as you have to find the numbers if they’re not in the copyright section of the book, but I like it. However, I know that many librarians on book twitter prefer Library of Congress organization. I guess it depends on what you grew up with and learned throughout school.

I’m not sure how other bookstagrammers and bloggers organize their nonfiction books, or if they even separate them from their fiction, but that’s something I’d like to ask.

So…

How do you organize your books?

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