Fresh (bruised and knackered, actually, but who's checking?) from a four-day house moving marathon, I am, on the one hand, relieved: all our possessions have made the transition to the new flat, the van is safely back at the hire depot, and the old flat has been cleaned to a deposit-refunding standard. On the other hand, however, I'm caught on the horns of a dilemma, staring down the barrel - to mix my metaphors - of the quandary that faces every book owner following a mass-transference of the contents of their shelves. How to arrange my books in their new home?
Believe me, I've tried nearly everything. I used to favour the popular "by genre" approach: different shelves for poetry, plays, fiction, non-fiction, travel, cookery ... The problem there, though, is that the travel shelf ends up only half-full, and then you're faced with the problem of what to complete it with. So you pick cookery, but cookery spills over onto the next shelf ... and so it goes. Even if you decide that, despite its flaws, the genre system is for you, there are further choices to be made. Do you organise each genre alphabetically? Do you attempt the infinitely tricky but profoundly impressive, if you can pull it off, genre-bleed - science into sci-fi, history books into historical fiction? (Actually, the latter would be a non-starter in our house as my boyfriend is a historian and is sceptical - nay, contemptuous - of the entire historical fiction field).
Perhaps you forsake genre altogether and go alphabetical. If so, does it offend your eye to see towering hardbacks pressed up against slim volumes of poetry? Does the resulting disjunction persuade you that you should abandon the alphabet and arrange your books entirely on aesthetic grounds, by size or - whisper it - colour? And is there any form of classification that won't break down within the first three months, leaving you surrounded by piles of books that you know, in your heart, will never come within striking distance of a shelf until the next time you move, when the whole process begins again?
People, I need your advice. How should I do it? How do you do it? Does anyone have a fail-safe system?
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