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Three Ways to Organize Your Growing Book Collection at Home

If you’re a bibliophile and have a collection that’s growing steadily, then you’ve most likely worried about looking for the best way to keep them in good condition. And since carelessly cramming them into every pile or corner isn’t going to cut it, you need a better option that makes it easier for people to find as well as make it more likely for you to pick one up and start reading.

Here are three ways on how you can thoroughly organize all your books at home:

Invest in the right storage options

The best way to make a home for your books is to simply buy bookshelves, especially if you don’t already have a current place for them. Be sure to choose a designated area for your bookshelf, or if you have a lot of books, designated areas for your bookshelves. Getting plastic storage boxes is also okay if you don’t have as much room, but the problem with using boxes rather than shelves it that they are more likely to attract dust and cobwebs.

They can also be quite heavy and difficult to move when they’re full. Aside from storage, you should also make sure you have a way to get any dust and cobwebs off your books, and this is where having a vacuum cleaner can really come in handy.

Stack your books

Don’t be afraid to pile them down on top of one another! If your books happen to be wide and there isn’t enough space on the shelf or box to keep them upright, your next best solution is to lay them down and pile them on top of one another. What’s great about organizing your books at home is that you can sort them in any arrangement you want: whether it’s by genre, alphabetical order, or even by cover, color, or the date you bought them.

Use a cataloguing system

When you have a growing collection of books that you plan on turning into a full home library, you need to have a fast, efficient method of sorting through different genres and titles to find what you’re looking for. To do this, you need to have a system. Depending on the collection size, you can use either of two types of systems for your collection. One of them is Dewey Decimal System, which categorizes books by main class, division, and section. The other is the Library of Congress Classification System, which organizes according to class, subclass, and topic area.

Lastly, you should know when to donate a book or not. If you’re not planning on reading it anytime soon, it might be better off donated, whether it’s at a second-hand store, a local library, or even a nearby school. If you don’t have anywhere you can donate books to, you can even choose to recycle paperbacks as an alternative.