How to organize books on shelves

Choosing a way to organise

Every scheme answers one question: when you want a particular book, where do you look? By author answers it best for fiction, because you usually remember who wrote a novel. By genre, then author keeps that rule inside each genre, which helps when you browse by mood rather than hunt for a title. Library classes do the same for non-fiction by subject, so every book on gardening or the history of France ends up together. Colour and size trade findability for looks or space, so pair them with the catalogue, which records each book’s shelf. To-read first is a temporary shelf that sits alongside any other scheme.

Most home libraries end up mixing two: fiction by author, non-fiction by subject, and one shelf of tall art books by size because they won’t fit anywhere else. That is fine as long as each part has one rule you can say out loud.

Library of Congress Classification explained

The Library of Congress Classification divides knowledge into 21 main classes, each with a letter: A for general works, B for philosophy, psychology and religion, P for language and literature, Q for science, and so on to Z for bibliography and library science. The letters I, O, W, X and Y are not used as main classes. Each class splits into subclasses of one to three letters: PR is English literature, PS American literature, QA mathematics, QB astronomy, TX home economics (which is where cookery lives). A full call number then adds a number for the topic and a code for the author, such as PR4034 .P7, which the finder reads as English literature from the letters alone.

The Library of Congress publishes the outline free on its website, so the whole of it is below and in the finder. Classes E and F, the history of the Americas, are the exception to the lettered subclasses: they go straight to numbers, so E151 to 909 is the United States and F1001 to 1145.2 is British America, including Canada.

The other scheme you will meet on library shelves is the Dewey Decimal Classification. OCLC says it owns all copyright rights in Dewey and that Dewey is its registered trademark, so this site names it but doesn’t reproduce its tables.

Shelve well, whatever the order

The order is yours to choose, but conservators agree on how books should stand. The Library of Congress says to keep shelved books upright, not leaning, with bookends if needed, and to shelve books of similar size together so each cover is supported by its neighbours. Books too large to stand upright can lie flat, fully supported, and NEDCC suggests piles of only two or three. That is one more reason a size-aware scheme, or a dedicated tall shelf, works well alongside author order.

A worked example

The sample shelf has fourteen books, from Pride and Prejudice to The Joy of Cooking. By author, it starts Austen, Bulfinch, Darwin, and The Hobbit files under T for Tolkien. By LC class, Bulfinch’s mythology (BL) comes first, then the art book (N), then the classics and literature (PA, PE, PR, PS), then the science (QB, QH), the gardening book (SB) and the cookbook (TX). The class letters for the samples were picked from the outline’s captions for each book’s subject; a library’s own call number would add numbers and an author code.

Common mistakes

• Filing under “The”. Ignore a leading A, An or The: The Hobbit goes under H.
• Too many genres. Twenty categories means twenty places to look. Five to ten is plenty.
• Packing shelves full. Leave room in every section, or one new book means moving a whole wall; and give tall books their own shelf with the bookshelf spacing calculator.
• Colour with no record. A rainbow shelf is lovely until you need one book; note each shelf in a catalogue.
• Guessing class letters. Look the book up in a library catalogue and copy the call number, then use the finder.

Building a mythology shelf? Myth Marsh sorts out who’s who among the Greek and Norse gods. For the language shelf, Etymoasis explores word roots.