Sunday, October 21, 2018

How We Organize Our Bookshelves


There are approximately seven media shelves in our apartment. One has my manga collection, another my PS2 collection and other games, and some just store random books. There is one shelf in our living room, a super nice one, where we put just our best and favorite books. Come along for a tour of the books on our main bookshelf!


The top shelf rightfully pays tribute to the greatest work of literature ever produced: Harry Potter. This holds all of the American hardbacks, many of which are the originals I read growing up, as well as a few of the spin-off books. We also have a few international editions, including multiple UK editions and a Japanese edition of The Philosopher’s Stone - it has the cutest illustrations.

Since there aren’t enough books to fill the shelf, we also have some decorative knick-knacks including a Slytherin mug, Draco Malfoy action figure, and more. In the back you can spot a piece of the display from a Spirit Halloween store - I nabbed it off them before they closed at the end of the season.

The second shelf from the top is what I call our “best hardbacks” a third of which aren’t hardbacks but… whatever. These are some of our favorite books, the one we’ve loved the most and are more likely to return to.

The majority of the books on this shelf are young adult, but there are a few middle-grade and non-fiction books in there too. They are organized alphabetically in those aforementioned categories and the shelf is decorated with some random knick-knacks for added flair. 


The shelf in the middle is our comics shelf. We don’t bag and board single issues, so this is exclusively filled with trade paperbacks and graphic novels. They’re first organized by publisher and then alphabetically with Marvel - our favorite - first followed by DC and then indie publishers.

As always we have our shelves decorated with some theme-appropriate knick-knacks, in this case, superhero action figures which are rotated and swapped out every now and then. As I said earlier, the manga is off on a different shelf so this is just western comics.


The fourth shelf is our younger readers shelf. It collects most of our middle-grade books simply because they’d be out of place on our “best hardbacks” shelf. The benefit of them being lower is that it’s easier for young guests - such as Katrina’s little brother - to browse them. This shelf is decorated with dinosaur skeleton figures. Because dinosaurs are cool.


The bottom shelf is long-term storage for the books on my TBR list that I don’t have any immediate plans to get too. Ironically some of these books I’ve had since I was twelve. Someday I’ll get to them. Since this is the bottom shelf and it holds books we’re not looking to read any time soon, it’s not particularly decorated beyond an old piece of artwork Katrina made that hides a stack of her extra journals.






How do you organize your shelves? Alphabetically? By size? Color? Let me know in the comments below!