Family Library Organizing
As with all organizing, how you approach bringing order to your library is unique to your family and your relationship to books. For some, their library is a physical manifestation of the intellectual and emotional journeys their books have taken them on, and they want to keep the majority of the works they read. For others, they only want to keep a small collection of the titles that made the most impact on their lives. And yet others see books principally as decorative accents in their homes!
I fell into the first category for most of my life, dragging my Tolstoy, Austen, Harry Potter, Twilight, and complete works of Shakespeare through repeated moves. These days, I have slimmed down my collection and keep only the books that mean the most to me (Austen and Tolstoy still feature, though the others have gone). This is to say that there is no right way to do it, and since your relationship to your library is not static, what you wanted at one point may no longer be the right fit.
The guiding principle of our organizing is Julie Morgenstern's S.P.A.C.E. acronym and we recommend that you use it here too. Your first step is to Sort your books. For a family library, it makes sense to sort books by owner, though if you have a large collection, each family member’s books could be sorted into categories such as fiction, non-fiction, cookbooks, comic books, and so on.
Once you have all your books laid out in distinct categories, you Purge. This step is always the most sensitive and requires input from every reader in the family. It also demands tolerance for the different priorities of each family member. You might want to keep only a handful of your most precious titles, but your 12-year-old might want to keep all 111 volumes of their manga series. That is okay! When you have finished the purging step, you can donate any unwanted books. There are a number of wonderful local organizations that accept donations, including the Prison Book Program and More Than Words. If you have fewer donations, we also recommend offering books to a local Little Free Library.
Next you Assign a home for the books. Maybe you have a playroom or a play corner of the family room where you can put all the picture books. You can opt to keep everyone’s books in one space. Or you can assign individual collections to bedrooms and offices, or any combination of those options that makes sense to you.
Now that you have decided where the books will live, you choose how to Contain them. Do you want built-in shelves? Freestanding bookshelves or maybe a book tower for homes with less horizontal space? Do you want to arrange them by author last name, topic, spine color, your own special system that makes sense to you and you alone? It’s your library, you get to decide.
Further down the line, you will need to work on Equalizing your collection. This simply means putting back books that got removed from their homes and not returned, reassessing your assignments and containment strategies if needed, and choosing where and if to keep any new books that come into your home.
If this all seems a little overwhelming, and you think you might need help from an organizing consultant, book a consultation with us and we can help walk you through the process!
