A bookshelf is the one piece of storage in most homes that has to do two jobs at once. It has to be a working system — you want to find the thing you are looking for without crouching, squinting and pulling out four wrong books first — and it has to be furniture, visible from the sofa for hours a day. Almost every organising method prioritises one and sacrifices the other. The trick is to decide, shelf by shelf, which job that particular shelf is doing.
Start by taking everything off
Yes, all of it, onto the floor or the bed. This sounds like unnecessary drama and it is the step that makes the difference, because you cannot make decisions about books you cannot see. Wipe the shelves down while they are empty — books shed a surprising amount of paper dust — and look at the shelf heights properly. Many flat-pack and even built-in shelves are adjustable, and the single most useful change you can make is to drop one shelf lower to create a tall section for art books, atlases and anything that currently lives sideways on top of the others.
As you take books off, make three piles: books you refer back to, books you have not read yet, and books you have finished and will not open again. The third pile is where space comes from. You are not obliged to keep every novel you have ever read as evidence of having read it. Be honest about the second pile too — if a book has been waiting four years, keeping it on the shelf is not making you more likely to read it, it is just making you feel slightly guilty every time you walk past.
