Book shelves - what do yours look like

Read a post on "Blog around the clock" - http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/03/how_do_you_shelve_your_books.php -- on how people shelve their books.

We have many many books. When you have two engineers and two librarians rolled up as only two people, there are is a huge number of topics of interest. So here is how they are organized:

1. shelves in both children's rooms with their books
2. shelf in kitchen with cookbooks
3. shelf in kitchen with reference for homework and resolving dinnertime discussions
4. around bed is books in progress -- always more than one
5. shelf in hall is unread books and books for my mother to take home to read
6. shelf in living room with my husbands books -- mostly nonfiction
7. pile in front hall is library books leaving or arriving
8. historical collection -- boxes in basement.

Now you might think the boxes in basement are lost books. Not for us. As each box was packed two moves ago, it was numbered and digitally photographed with the box number visible in each photo. Boxes with more than one layer were photographed multiple times.

We all know that we remember what the book looked like, sometimes better than what it was called. This way, to find a book, all we have to do is scan through the digital photos, find the number of the box, and pull the box.

Easy, efficient, and space saving.