The Asimov Shelf

I love books.

I own a lot of them.

I own more books than I do shelves.  This is a big problem.

We've lived in our house about 3 years.  Our old house had built-in bookshelves so that I had plenty of places to put all of my books.  They were organized by genre, and then within genres, they were organized by author.  The highly structured organization was pleasing to my brain.  Not to mention, it was super easy to find what I was looking for if I ever wanted to refer to something I had read, or just to go back and read a favorite passage.

Then we moved.  I love our new house, but one thing it lacks is the built-in bookshelves.  While we do own shelves, we do not own enough to make up for our lack of built-ins.  When we moved, things went into boxes not by genre, or by author, but by size.  If we had room for one more paperback in a box, it went in that box.  It didn't matter if it was a zombie novel next to a historical fiction, they just went in together.

When we unpacked, we just unpacked what we could, and things went on the shelf next to what they had been packed next to.

It was chaos.  Books on finance next to space operas.  Fantasy next to religious books.  Economics books hiding among zombies.  I know you're understanding the horror.  It's not pretty.

I tried to organize, but since half of our books were in boxes, it seemed that to have everything organized would require to take some things out of boxes while putting other things in boxes.  They wouldn't be on shelves but at least they'd be together.  It seemed like too much work, since the end result would still leave it difficult to find a particular book inside a box.  I never made the effort.  The horror continued.

I'd been bothering Robyn to authorize a bookshelf purchase for quite some time.  I just wanted some place to put books.  She wanted something that was beautiful and glorious that would change our lives forever.  I have nothing against beautiful, glorious, life changing items, but it's just hard to find them.  So 3 years went by and the horror of my book collection only grew.

Then a friend had a bookshelf for sale for $10.  I asked Robyn, expecting her to say that it wasn't life changing.  But she approved!

This means I now have room to start putting books in an organized fashion.  It's sort of like the game Freecell.  You need those extra free cells to organize all the cards.

So the great change has begun.  I figured I'd start with my favorite author.  I went through all our boxes and all our shelves.  (I still haven't found them all, there are some hiding elsewhere, but I've made progress).  I now have a shelf dedicated to Isaac Asimov!

It's only 1 shelf, but it's the beginning of the organization that will spread throughout my house.  Very soon, I will be able to tell you where any book I own resides.

Because of that, this new book shelf really will be life changing.