bookends

I’ve had the pleasure of reorganising our home library over the last few days.

By library I mean our total collection of books, rather than a purpose-specific room to house them.

That comes later.

The 2,600+ books we have are in fact spread across our house: living room, office, rumpus room, kitchen and bedrooms.

They have always been in a rough sort of order, but as their number has increased I decided to sort them out a bit, putting them into categories which would be useful for family members to find specific books.

These categories came out of roughly grouping the books and then regrouping them based on how many books there were, how they might be placed on the available bookshelves and the likely ease of browsing them. That determined the category names.

Within the categories, books might be grouped alphabetically by author (as in the fiction categories) or some other useful order (such as alphabetical order of subject for biographies, or alphabetical order of sport).

Where a book could fit in more than one category, I went for the one most likely to be searched for, based on what I know about the people doing the searching. I’m the person most likely to want to find Ruud Gullit’s autobiography and I think I’m more likely to look for it under Sport than International Biography. If that turns out to be wrong then I can refile it in the Int Bio section instead.

So here’s the list of categories:

• Australian Biography
• International Biography
• Australian Fiction
• International Fiction
• Web & IT
• Australian Society, Culture & Politics
• International Society, Culture & Politics
• Essays, Interviews & Letters
• Poetry
• Plays
• Cooking, House & Garden
• Fiction for Kids
• Non-Fiction for Kids
• About Kids
• Sport
• International Multi-Author Anthologies & Collections
• Australian Multi-Author Anthologies & Collections
• Games, Trivia & Puzzles
• Women’s Issues
• Writing & Language
• Travel Guides & Languages
• Reference
• Film
• Travel & Exploration
• Music & Theatre
• Science, Mathematics & the Natural World
• Philosophy & Religion
• Death