how to keep track of your books

my guide to a home library system that actually works

Photo by Norbert Tóth on Unsplash

For serious readers, books are a pleasure, an escape, a comfort and collection of memories, ideas and experiences rolled into one. But books are also a burden — the physical objects I mean. You well may have switched to digital in recent years, but if you are over thirty and have been reading voraciously since childhood, your home will still likely still be teeming with them.

On top of this, many of us are being forced to live in smaller spaces (whether through attrition or market forces) and yet most serious readers I know still manage accumulate more books, almost despite ourselves. It’s an untenable state of affairs further complicated by the fact that most of us remain irrationally and unshakeably attached to the books we already have.

Honestly? There have been times in my life when I have worried I might end up dead under a fallen stack of dusty, disorganised books. The first ten years I lived in this house, for example. Both of us came to the relationship a truckload.

Since the end of my marriage, my personal book collection has — thank god — been reduced down to a far more manageable size. I kept only the books that were mine, that I knew I loved enough to return to, but still… it’s a bit overwhelming. After the Initial Great Cull, the books that remained ended up scattered on shelves around the house, unsystematised — I was no longer afraid of being crushed, but I could never keep track of where the remaining books were and spent half my life trying to hunt down the ones I wanted. I was absolutely determined do something about it.

Then a year passed.

Books are heavy and take up a great deal of space. They’re hard to move and even harder to organise. If you look online you’ll find a bottomless pit of instructional videos, Pinterest memes and Apps advising you on how best to go about it. If you are a serious reader, my advice is to ignore all of it.

There is only one way serious readers with a critical mass of books should organise our shelves and that is in roughly the same way good bookshops and libraries do. But libraries and bookshops have staff! People who literally work day and night keeping the book-finding system in order! How is a serious reader with a full time job and an actual life, meant to cope?

Now that I am finally single again, with my own collection of books, I decided to organise them properly, once and for all. I needed a moveable, personalised system, one that could be expanded and contracted at will and adjusted according to my changing interests and reading whims. So I did some research, thought long and hard, and after procrastinating for months, over the holidays I finally devised one.

I’ve been living with it for a couple of weeks now and I’m pleased to say it works.

If you’re drowning in book chaos and up for a bit of a challenge, I promise it can work for you too. It’s easy, once you get the hang of it.

The steps are as follows: