Last week I did a tour of my crafting area (which has already changed with J's addition of steel shelving).  This week, I though I would do a tour of my bookshelves.  While I was gone over Christmas, J cleaned out the entire office, bought bookshelves, and emptied all the boxes.  I don't have a handy pic of the before, but imagine a closet with no doors filled with on bursting bookshelf and about 12 stacked moving boxes all full of books.  I'm happy to say that all those boxes are unpacked with their contents on display and easy to access.

Our first stop on the tour isn't in the office, but in the living room.  I have a small storage ottoman that holds my current month's reading choices.  When I formulate each month's TBR pile, I make sure to put those physical books inside the ottoman.  Of course, the ebooks can't be put into the ottoman, but I do reorder iBooks to reflect my current TBR.  I've found that the ottoman makes it easier to choose a new book.  Instead of perusing all my shelves, I just lift the lid and grab a book.  Usually there are only 10 choices or so.  I've also taken to keeping my library books in the ottoman.  But as I have put myself on a limited usage library plan (until I read more of my owned books), there is usually one a few library books in there.

Moving into the office proper...

Here's the big view of the closet.  Those three bookshelves span the entire width of the closet with about 2 inches to spare.  According to J, it was a chore trying to get them all in there and in position.  You can't see form this pciture, but there is room atop the bookshelves.  Mostly it holds miscellaneous computer equipment, but J did put a couple of his books sets (His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, James Bond series by Ian Fleming, etc) up there and out of the way.

The first bookshelf is full of my books.  I separated fiction from non-fiction and then authors A-L and M-Z.  The first three shelves contain fiction books grouped by author and more or less alphabetical.  The fourth shelf contains books I want to keep and the fifth holds most of our scrapbook albums.

The middle bookshelf is a hodge-podge of styles.  The top two shelves are J's books (business, comics, and science fiction).  The third shelf is my leftover mass market paperback fiction.  The last two shelves hold half of my nonfiction collection.

The last shelf in the closet is another hodge-podge.  The top three shelves are all J's books (mostly nonfiction).  The bottom two shelves hold the rest of my nonfiction collection.

The last stop on my tour is the small bookshelf in the entryway to the office.  Our apartment is cut so that there is a four foot long hallway off the main hallway leading to the office door.  It's a weird space: not long enough or wide enough to be really useful.  But it's the perfect size to stash my small bookshelf.  The double stacked shelves hold the rest of my fiction collection.  Not quite super easy access, but at least all of my books are out of the boxes.

That's it, a tour of bookshelves.  My goal for 2014 is to decrease my library (i.e. read and sell) so that my shelves aren't double stacked.  It's a tall order, but so far this year I've already made a good sized dent.