HOW I ORGANIZE MY BOOKSHELVES

Some time ago I switched up how I ordered the books on my bookshelf. I like it a lot and want to tell you about it.

I sort the books by when they the author wrote them. My thought, was that by seeing all the books laid out in time a quick glance can tell you something. Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, often mentioned in the same breath, are separated by World War II. Thoreau wrote Walden—which feels not so far away from me here in New England—before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Sure someone else would struggle looking for a specific book, but this is my library. I can find any book and I love to sit and listen to the tale the sorting scheme tells.

Great as it is, I did have to handle a few edge cases, mostly from histories. The problem is that some histories are vast and others narrow. Still, some histories are important works in their own right. In the end I chose to classify them into one of three groups:

I sort the iconic histories in the first group according to when the writer wrote them. For example, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is in the neighborhood of Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin, not Plutarch and Augustine. This group also hold’s Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy.

I place the more pedestrian histories by when the events they write about took place. The ones that cover a few years get slotted in accordingly. For example, Shrier’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich came out in 1960 but it’s sorted as belonging to 1945. Its the same deal for most war histories. Histories that span centuries, like The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland or Davies’ Europe: A History live in their own section. Anthologies like In Our Own Words: Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century, African American Poetry, or Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language are likewise sequestered.

When it comes to editions, its a judgment call. One of my favorite books is Adler’s How to Read a Book. It was first published in the 1940s but had an enormous rewrite in the 70s and that’s the version I know best. Accordingly, its closer to MLK’s Where Do We Go From Here than it is to Sinclair’s It Can’t Happen Here. By contrast, Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass in 1855 before spending the rest of his life adding to it. I like the first edition so its tucked in near Walden.

In the end the scheme has a few more caveats than I would’ve guessed, but its coherent.