Shelfish

 

The biggest dilemma facing book owners (notice how I didn’t say readers?) is how to organize the shelves. I suppose in some corners of the world leaving piles is acceptable, but that offers little in the way of nocturnal stability when rushing to the kitchen for rehydration. 

You could sort by color. But what color? That of the dust jacket? The actual spine? Or the soot left from a lettered conflagration? Personally, I don’t see color in my books, since I’m took busy leafing through the index for obscenities to notice. The pages are almost always white or beige. That seems weird and wrong, considering how far we’ve come. Do people not realize what color the Rosetta Stone is? It isn’t white. Microsoft Word, the program I have so mindlessly devoted my life to, is just as vanilla. But at least vanilla has a nice smell to it. Not these digital documents with their blinking cursor and pale nothingness. Newspapers are gray, and that seems like a good compromise. Except when you consider the certain demise of print journalism. The Gray Lady, for all her fame and fortune, is not gray when you’re browsing the website. It’s white. Another reason to support hard copies. 

You could organize by weight, by height, alphabetical by author’s last name, alphabetical by author’s first name, numerical by author’s IQ, etc. You could sort from love to hate, the books you adore ending with the ones you despise. You could divide by the books you legitimately read with the ones you tell people you’ve read to look smarter. However, this is one method that proves problematic when company invariably wonders, “I love what you’ve done with your bookshelves. How did you do it?”

The only thing you can’t do is use the Dewey Decimal System.