#anyways i have both the full series on my shelves and they're such nice books to look at both inside and out

[allthegothihopgirls]

no book series does a visual aesthetic quite like a series of unfortunate events and miss peregrine's home for peculiar children do

[thebookdragonsden]

We have upwards of approximately 3500 physical books crossing a wide variety of genres and formats so it mostly comes down to two factors:

1) how easy will it be to find a specific book... which rules any rainbow designs right out because I don't generally remember color of the spine on a book

2) what will best utilize space because I need to also be able to exist in said space, I move a lot, and I can't always afford a nice big house to put bookshelves galore in so I have 13 shelves. How can I make it all fit while also maintaining 1)

So aside from rainbow (pretty but useless for anything but aesthetics and omg the amount of work) we dash a little bit of everything in there.

Shelf 1: my tiny collection of translated Chinese novels because they don't really fit anywhere else and I bought a new shelf for it. It's small.

Shelf 2: all my wife's psychology books on top shelf, all the mythology and mythology retellings on 2nd shelf (wife's request and I hate this shelf with a burning passion because if didn't know it was a retelling I'm looking for it elsewhere), adult fantasy trade paperbacks (bigger than mass market and we have a lot fewer of them), non fiction, historical fiction, and mystery

Tldr this shelf is kind of a dumping ground shield for things we don't have enough of to fill a full bookshelf but also have too many of to put on one of the tall, narrow shelves

Shelf 3. Mass market adult sci-fi fantasy paperbacks

Shelf 4. Overflow for huge YA fantasy, paperback adult fantasy that is the same size as smaller hard cover fantasy (these are bigger than trades too... yes I know why God are there so many book sizes)

Shelf 5. Graphic novels

Shelf 6 and 7. Manga

Shelf 8 and 9. YA fantasy novels, all smaller sizes and couple of the huge ones that bleed over to shelf 4

Shelf 10. (Tall and narrow) artbooks, poetry, shelves dedicated to fav authors (Lynn Flewelling, Marissa Meyer, Terry Pratchett)

Shelf 11. (Tall and narrow) more shelves dedicated to fav authors or just authors we've a lot of books for- Mercedes Lackey, Patrick Ness, Neil Gaiman, Susanna Kearney, and biographies

Shelf 12. Huge adult Sci fi/fantasy hard covers

Shelf 13. A big shelf but with small broken up squares dedicated to... YA contemporary, Maggie Stiefvater, Leigh Bardugo, Holly Black, Tamora Pierce, historical fiction, and finally two long shelves of language learning books

For the genre shelves, they're arranged by author

Graphic novel shelf is arranged by some bizarre algorithm of my wife's and I just end up hunting through it all before I find what I'm looking for.

Manga is.... well.... one shelf is series I've completed, other shelf is series in still collecting, and both of those are organized by title except... the bookshelves have cool gliding front shelves so I can essentially double stack the manga and still have easy visibility on it all so the face shelf of completed manga is all of the larger manga volumes (perfectly sized) and the face shelf of the incomplete manga is all CLAMP... because I own pretty much every volume of everything CLAMP that has ever been released in English except X/1999 because I'm still salty CLAMP never completed it. And Suki, which I did own once upon a time but might be the only CLAMP project I actively disliked.

All of this is not including the random stacks of books pulled on top of the shelves or around the shelves that my wife swears she is reading and getting rid of but I genuinely have no idea what is.

For the record, not mad about the last bit. Being surrounded by books is my happy place whether I read them or not.

Anyway tldr I am probably not your intended audience for this and I hope you get/got an answer you were happy with but I find perverse amusement in sharing the utter lack of cohesive vision that is our library set up.

This is very important research so I can figure out how to arrange my books