Disorganized Organization

I needed my bookshelves to be organized by color. I just did. I'd seen it as a design element in a few places and poo pooed it at first, but it just looked so darn pretty. And I had a whole new set of built in bookshelves to really decorate. We used to have some dinky IKEA shelves on either side of the window in our living room. With the help of my Dad, we built full-sized built-ins on either side of the window (probably doubling our book capacity) and built a storage chest/window seat in the middle. I love love love it. But when the shelves were finally finished...after a few months of work during my pregnancy and bed rest...Bean arrived and we just threw all of the books onto the shelves and left them there.

But aha! I am now home alone with a baby all day. A baby who, in a recent turn of events, has learned how to nap in the early afternoon. Brilliant baby. And so I finally decided to throw caution to the wind and create a librarian's total nightmare: two full shelves organized only by color. I briefly entertained the idea of removing the dust jackets to kick it up a notch, but I'm really into simplifying my crap these days, not adding to it by trying to find storage for dust jackets which I know, once removed, will never make it back onto the books (even though I'd go on storing them indefinitely which was the same problem I had with those CD binders from the early 1990s which I filled but then couldn't bring myself to throw the jewel cases away...big mess). Andrew was skeptical at first, but saw the writing on the wall (I'm home all day, you have to be at work, nya nya) and in his consistent gentle way observed the process, but didn't say much. Until, after I'd basically finished the first top row (red) and I found him over by the line of orange/yellow I was creating and he said, with trepidation, "Wait, so all of the philosophy books won't be together?" Dear, sweet man. As luck would have it, most of the philosophy books were either black or neutral on the spine so it worked out pretty well in the end. I can't say the same for fiction, but (perhaps not surprisingly) science is mostly in the blues and greens. See? Change your perspective on something and a whole new way of looking at things opens up.

So, we have red/orange going across the top rows, yellow across the second, greeny blue on the third, bluish purplish on the fourth and then below that (out of the picture frame) there is a beigy row and then the whites and blacks on the very bottom.

Organizing the shelves like this also enabled me to cannibalize knick knacks from other places in the house which now, because of the rainbow of books, have their own colors highlighted in new and unique ways. And teaching Stella the colors of the rainbow will be so much more literary. AND Andrew (dear, sweet man) has stated that he thinks that he'll be able to recall the colors of most of his favorite books so that it won't be so frustrating to find them after all. Sorry folks, he's already taken.