Order

The ever amazing Caroline over at One Pedestrian has spent the day sorting her CDs into alphabetical order. Which has reminded me of my dilemma, for whilst my CDs are nicely alphabetical, my books are all over the shop.

Multiple book shelves (mostly two deep), in multiple rooms, on multiple floors. As I think Fragile Tender once described it - the curse of the literate.

The only order is based loosely on height, with taller tomes consigned to deeper shelves - space optimisation always the key. Other than that, they're all just jumbled up, a little bit of themeing in places, the odd little cluster by author, some loose differentiation by date of purchase, but nothing hard and fast and trying to find anything is becoming a real nightmare.

Can someone not design a gadget using tiny tags (maybe those tracking chips that people get upset at Tescos putting in their razor packs) that help you track them?

Or do I alphabetise within the size groupings?

Even if that worked, it feels, well a little too ordered (I know, don't ask my why it's different for CDs - maybe because they're already more uniform in outline?).

Of course I could take a lead from S who once famously drove P mad, by reordering their entire book collection, by colour of spine. It looked very pretty apparently, and as S said, in order to find something all you needed to do is remember the colour of the book's spine...

Maybe not eh?