Your Personal Library/Shelf/Pile o' Books

I don't have shelves, but I have wood walls and floors that I keep pretty clean, so I'm not too concerned about preservation. I stack in nice neat piles, so it looks nice and it keeps them out of the center of the room.

As I said in the other thread, I'm a genre nerd, so I separate that way for the most part. I always stack the hardcovers first, then go to TPBs, and finally mass market paperbacks.

North wall, west to east: New York City-related literature and nonfiction; crime library (detective novels, crime thrillers, and true crime books).

East wall, north to south: Filmmaking/music/comic TPBs/pop culture; general non-fiction, general fiction/literature.

I really don't give a fuck about what people think about my reading habits. If you want to get down to it, I think there's enough on my shelves to demonstrate an eclecticism and intelligence (as well as the large ratio of books to room size). You could argue the fact that I buy rather than borrow from a library for the most part is an attempt to show off, and I guess you'd be right. But when it comes down to it, I don't mind that I have a copy of Go Go Girls of the Apocalypse between John Cheever and Joyce Carol Oates. Or that I have The Other Hollywood, an oral history of American porno movies, next to Evan Thomas's RFK biopic. It's one of the things about my shelves I get a kick out of.

Dining room: 1 bookshelf, 131 books (cookbooks, general household, art, self-help, myth & religion & folklore & general weirdness, several illustrated books/graphic novels (Spiegelman, The Big Books of ______, etc.) + uncounted photo albums & yearbooks)

Entry hall: 1 bookshelf, 207 books (general fiction)

Living room: 3 bookshelves.
1st bookshelf (rear wall by couch): 131 books (general fiction continued, young adult (my wife was a YA librarian), film & tv, quiz & activity, + uncounted coloring books)
2nd bookshelf (front wall, left of tv): 70 books (HP Lovecraft & Lovecraftian fiction collection, horror fiction analysis, some graphic novels, the wife's Anne Rice collection)
3rd bookshelf (front wall, right of tv): 96 books (Stephen King collection, new age & metaphysics crap, yoga, cartoon collections (Far Side, Calvin & Hobbes, etc.), children's (Shel Silverstein, A.A. Milne, Disney) + uncounted yoga journals)

Hall: 1 bookshelf, 86 books (classical literature, Harry Potter)

Guest Room: 1 bookshelf, 117 books (dictionaries & thesauri, writing, medicine, science & technology, history, library science, miscellaneous (The Book of Lists, etc.) + uncounted library journals)
Also, 35 currently uncategorized books (YA, crime fiction, etc.) on the dresser.

Office: 1 bookshelf, 88 books (true crime & crime encyclopedias, sex & erotica)

Total: A surprisingly low 961 titles

I used to be a constant buyer (and I still can't resist used book stores), but I've been more reliant on libraries as I run out of space and/or finances suffer.

I also used to not care whether it was hardcover or paperback, but as I age and my eyesight deteriorates (and it was never great to begin with) I find I prefer the larger print of hardcovers.

Heh, we have a small, built-in bookshelf in our living room and I have stocked it with ringers - I call it my "wanker shelf" - The Republic of Plato, The Inferno, The Iliad, Hume, a 500-page book on the Russian Revolution, selected Jim Harrison and Hunter S Thompson, etc....it's my best literary foot forward.

Of course, I can at least say I've READ all those books.

I have all my RPG books on a small two-shelf bookshelf. I have fiction books grouped by author, but they're not in any particular order outside of that. Non-fiction are all together on one case.

My only organization is that I've got all really old books in one spot, out of the way so my kids hopefully won't get at them, and then my to-read books on a couple shelves that are the easiest to get at. The rest are mixed together with no rhyme or reason.

Right now I have not made any concerted effort to buy PB vs hardcover, but I have started thinking about it. Eventually I'll start rebuying books in hardcover, but probably only because I happen to love that particular book. Well, and since I listen to a lot of audiobooks, there are definitely some I want in paper form.

I intensely dislike the bookcases I have in my home office but am too cheap to replace them. In a perfect world, where I had the money and the time, I'd put in some really nice floor-to-ceiling bookcases and then start really working on the contents and presentation. But for now I get books however I can and just read.

I used to take great care in ordering my books. Now I just sling one wherever there's space.

I should seriously think about getting rid of a few.

I have two 3 shelf bookcases filled w/ fiction. Horror first, w/ the shortstories followed by the Stephen Kings (all to date except Rose Madder & Blaze), and almost all in hardcover, with a place of honor reserved for my battered PB copy of "Cujo", the 1st grown up novel I read as a kid, and the one that started me down the path to horror. Then by author, alphabetically. Other fiction follows, grouped by category (sci fi, mystery, etc.), and by author within the category. I have another 3 shelf bookcase for the nonfiction (almost all of it history of one kind or another), loosely grouped by subject. I have 2 large, 3 shelf wooden cases for my comic book collection (and in DESPERATE need for more, as my Creepy collection expands after every Comicon). My D&D books are ina milk crate for ease of transport (as I had a campaign going for awhile a few years ago, which 3 out of the 4 players involved hold out vague hopes for continuing), with Rifts books on a shelf in the home office. I have a 5 shelf case w/ 3 shelves dedicated solely to cook books, grouped by subject, more or less. The other 2 are filled w/ DVD's. My wife, a teacher who has taught preschool and 5th grade so far, has a HUGE collection of kids books of all types she's accumulated over the years, in several bookcases and the built in shelves in the office. I support the concept of libraries, but cnfess I rarely use them. I like to own books. I may never read one again, but I just like to HAVE them in my hands and gaze fondly on them on my shelf. I also hope one day to instill the love of reading - horror fiction in particular - in my son, and leave them to him someday. I sincerely hope he will get the same joy from them that I did. Hardcover vs. PB? I try to get all the Stephen King's in HC, b/c he was my favorite author for years, and it'd be nice to have a complete library of his work in HC. Beyond that, I don't particularly care what format it's in. I'd probably lean toward PB's for economical and space saving reasons.

Welp, it all depends on the amount of radical socialist diatribes to balance out the Noam Chomsky-esque libertarian manifestos, as these topics are covered in volumes thick enough to keep my thin Philip K. Dick volumes upright between them.

I'll group by author or series if I can help it, outside of that it's pretty random as I have book shelves in a few rooms and the main corridor of the house. My books are also pretty mixed up with my missus' and her taste is a little more highborw with a lot of books left over from her literature honours days, so its a pretty all over the place as far as any kind of order goes.

I read a lot, but I don't own a lot of books. I typically will borrow from friends or the library, and when I do buy books I lend them out as soon as I am done reading them. I have a circle of about 12 people I have been doing this with for the last few years and it works really well. The books I do keep at home are mostly to do with writing, and then graphic novels/comic compilations; they all live in a small two-shelf book-case in our bedroom. You would probably miss half of them if you saw the shelf anyways, as I have a lot of issues of things like Acme Novelty Library, and those books do not fit on shelves easily (other than lying them in a pile one on top of the other).

Question for Rath: how come you don't have shelves? Is that a design/personal decision, or is shelving exorbitantly expensive where you live?

My wife calls ours the pretentious git section. It's mostly books we read in university but we have some stuff we read for fun as well.

The strangest parts of our book collection are Mrs H's collection of sex manuals through the ages, my collection of different versions of To Kill A Mockingbird (I buy every version I can find for some odd reason, it's a compulsion) and our collection of banned books (we started that when we found out she was pregnant. We wanted to be sure our child had access to as much as possible).

For some reason I find that fantastic.

Mrs H got a list of banned and formerly banned books from a friend who's a librarian. We were disgusted by the list so we just started collecting them to make sure we do our part so they don't disappear.

That's really inspirational, I am going to start doing this for my daughters as well! Do you have the ability to post that list?

I can and will do so before the end of the weekend.

Thanks so much!

Great list, thanks.

I cleared out my library a year or so ago. Donated over 200 baseball books to the Baseball Hall of Fame (and got a nice tax receipt in the bargain). Donated a crapload of RPG books to a local gaming club. A lot of graphic novels and trades to local hospitals. Most everything else I gave away or sold. Most of the books I've kept are non-fiction, on history or education. A few are of sentimental value, like a book by Roger Angell my old man gave me for my 18th birthday, or personally inscribed copies of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Atwood's Alias Grace, or Alice Munro's Carried Away. A few university literature collections. A few signed 1st editions by some crime writers like Charles Willeford, Roderick Thorp, and Kent Anderson. That's about it.