Check Out Other People's Books

Anne over at the wonderful and very thought provoking blog Modern Mrs Darcy is doing a great link up today.

You get to check out other people's bookshelves...and there are no worries that you will look nosey when doing it!

I'll be honest. I always like to see what other people liked reading enough that they put it on their bookshelf. I often get some great suggestions on what I should pick up as my next book. Plus you learn a lot about the other person!

Be sure to check out the other participants by clicking here.

I am sharing this post...an oldy but goody.


I needed to organize my bookshelves.

I do not have a before picture to show you, but let's just say it looked something like this...

 

Via

 



And here is the after...

These bookshelves have been around through four moves and three paint jobs. A couple of the shelves have footprints in the paint from where my then toddler son ran across them, while they were drying on the floor, during one of the repaints. Needless to say these bookshelves and I have been through a lot together, and I love that now the shelves are cleared and organized. It really shows my books off to their best advantages. I also now have the room to add a few extra decorative items to the shelves.

First thing I did was pare down the books to only the ones I truly could not part with. This was so hard to do! It was a bit like having to say good bye to old, dear friends. I kept stopping to read them.

I looked something like this....

The Bookworm by Carl Spitzweg

 

Finally, I had two boxes full of books, and I carted them off to donate to the local Friends of the Library Book Sale.

 

I decided to organize the books roughly by subject. This has really helped me be able to quickly find what I am looking for.

 

 

 

I placed some of the books at different angles to add interest to the shelves.

 

 

My mother gave me this pillow, and it is one of my favorite things.  The glass vase was hand blown at a glass factory near my hometown.

 

 

The organized bookshelves were such an improvement to my living room, that I went to work on the bookshelf in my children's room. 

 

 

 

We mainly group the books here by subject, author or reading level.

 

 

 

Now that our bookshelves look so great, I declared a ban in our house...no more buying books just to be buying books. As a result, I have to really like the book for me to purchase it and put it on my bookshelf. We almost exclusively get all of our books from the public library now. I would love to see the data of which family checks out the most books at our library. I think we would win.

How do you organize your books, and how do you decide which make the cut to put on the shelves?