Guardian writers Sarah Crown and John Crace offer advice on how to arrange one’s shelf of books, for instance: “The kleptomaniac: Easy. You just arrange your books in accordance with the numbering system of the library from which you nicked them.” I suppose some collections could be arranged by theological tradition–Reformed, Wesleyan, Catholic, Dispensational, maybe Humanist. I doubt that would be helpful.
I once visited a theological bookstore in Oxford. They had three major sections:
Catholic (with many, many subsets)
Eastern Orthodox
Dissidents.
Strangely enough, C.S. Lewis managed to find his way into a subset of the Catholic section. Indubitably because of the fervent prayers of departed saints Lewis and Chesterton.
Unfortunately, since I have far more books than shelves, I’ve been forced to sort mine by size to maximize useful shelf space. Top shelf is set for standard small paperbacks. Second top shelf is set for trade paperbacks. From there the shelves grow to accomodate Duodecimo, Octavo and Quarto hardcovers as you work your way down with the bottom shelf on a couple of bookcases expanded to contain three ring binders.
Of course this arrangement produces some interesting mixing with Bill Cosby on the same shelf with Billy Graham and Alexander Solzenhitzn.
At least I don’t have the problem that Gordon McDonald has with his wife insisting he donate a pile of books to the town fair book table every year.
I divide my books by subject, with different units and shelves for different themes. Within those, it’s generally alphabetical.
I knew an old pastor years back, who used to fondly recall how his new bride rearranged all his books as a surprise–by height.
I tried to arrange my books by color once, but it didn’t work out. I also thought of making solid color covers for many of them, but what’s the point?
When I’ve had my office books set up in a pastor’s office I’ve generally had things in order of importance and quality from top to bottom – i.e., I had Bibles on the top shelves, theological & other books in between, and my “heresy shelf” of publications by heretical sects on the bottom.
Even though my home library is arranged by size, my office bookshelves are topical. I have a few large commentary sets (Lenski, Kiel & Delitsch, etc) that each consume half a shelf or more. Then I have a shelf of assorted New Testament commentaries and a shelf of Old Testament commentaries, all arranged by book of the Bible followed by Greek & Hebrew language study grammars and lexicons. Below that are Practical Theology and Christian Living. Like Michael I keep my heretical books on the bottom shelf and usually set a chair or my guitar in front of them.
One storage category I struggle with is the immense number of tracts, pamphlets and booklets that come my way. Because there is no title on the binding, the front cover needs to be accessible. But that makes for inefficient use of shelf space.
What do others do with booklets and pamphlets?