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Here’s the problem: you love books and you have lots of them. How to get them organized?

If you are like me, you want to be surrounded by your books, they are like friends who follow you through your life. My books remind me of the stages of my life I have gone through. Often, I get one off the shelf and spend time reading or looking up stuff.

I have:

  • professional books (cooking books I bought during my chef’s career for inspiration and education)
  • children’s books
  • a few school books, I thought were worth keeping
  • lots of encoclypedias
  • dictionaries
  • novels
  • history, art and photography books
  • lots of educational books (geology, geography, archeology, zoology, botanics…)
  • and many many more

BooksI shipped 20 moving boxes from Germany, full with books only, when I moved over and ever since, I added a few more to my collection. I used to organize them by category, by size and by language. And who knows what. And now I live in Portland that has the biggest bookstore I have ever seen: Powell’s! An entire street block, 4 stories, nothing but books! Trouble!!

Back to getting your books organized: how about organizing them by color? If you have a lot of books, you can still organize them by topic and then divide them into colors. I decided to separate my cook books (200 of them!) from the other books since they’ll be living in the kitchen.

Book organizingThe living room looks a lot less cluttered with the books being organized by color (and I actually find books I am looking for a lot faster).

Another tool improve your organizing skills by using colors!