Book Shelf: Organization Inspiration

We had a great Father's Day yesterday, despite the fact that my 20 month old decided that he didn't need to nap, or go to bed early for that matter.  He ran at 100 mph all day long.  By 6:00 pm I was totally tuckered out and just let him do his thing.  His mess makings have inspired this post.  He decided that he should pull all of the books off the book shelf and stack them on the bathroom floor, what exactly he was doing I am not sure, but I really like the end result.

Green-Yellow

Orange-Red

Blue-Violet

After a while of allowing him to do his thing I called him back into the room to ask him to help me clean up the books.  He really was quite helpful at putting the books away.  Since I was having to reorganize almost the entire book shelf I decided that I should mix things up a bit.  Normally I organize the books by Author, or by genre, but this time I decided to organize them by color. These are mostly my husbands books-thankfully he is a good sport about it.  My husband and I are both book lovers, but having a background in art and illustration, I appreciate the covers more often than the actual book.  Anyhow I organized 3 of the shelves by color .  Green-yellow, orange-red, and blue-violet.  I am quite pleased with the way our little shelves turned out.  Some of the books would have dark spines and colored text, and some had colored covers and neutral spines, so I had to decide which part of the book to color code.  I often used the end of the row to display some of my favorite book covers (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Wise Blood (I actually read and enjoyed that one), Catch 22, and Frankenstein.

Magazine Dividers

This is the top shelf of our book case.  Last weekend when I went thrifting I found these great little magazine dividers.  I spray painted them gray and yellow and now they found their home on the top shelf (I had to box up some less frequently read books and put them in storage, but I am liking the way these sit on our shelf).


Aarggh...I keep attempting to upload some additional photos for displaying books (click here to see the rest of this post), but for some reason blogger isn't allowing me at this moment.  I'll try to upload them a bit later.  My husband saw them and turned green with envy...one day when I have a Craft room and not a craft area, he will have a library and not just a book shelf.  One day our book shelves won't be purchased at Wal-Mart, and our books will all be hardbacks, but for now we'll be grateful for our color coded paperbacks on our Wal-Mart bookshelf.