We love books around here. We are addicted to buying books. That creates a problem. We keep running out of shelf space! The good part about that is that we have a person in the house who likes to build things out of wood, so I asked Elijah to build us more shelving in the library. The library is a very wide hallway in the center of the house, and we now have floor-to-ceiling shelves all around it. Elijah took advantage of a weekend when most of us went away for two nights to do the construction. He had been away a lot just before that, so didn’t want to be gone again, and Esther wanted to stay home, so they took care of the cows and the house, and built.
Esther helped take the books off the shelves as soon as they finished the morning work, and then he got busy. She sent us several pictures throughout the day to keep us updated.
After we got home, we put the books back on the shelves, and since then I’ve done a little tweaking to organize them better. Now, Esther and two of the boys just arrived home from a month in America, and brought a lot more books in their suitcases. We’re soon going to run out of space again!
Do you label/catergorize all your books like they do at the library? Good idea. We have lots and lots of books, too. My bookcase is full, and I keep getting more books! Doesn’t help that we have a bookstore in the area…;)
Yes, we’ve divided them into broad categories… Adult Fiction, Junior Fiction, Picture books, Adult Biography, Junior Biography, Adult History, Adult Nonfiction, Family, Theology, Devotionals, Junior Theology, Junior History, Junior Geography, Junior Science, Adult Miscellaneous, and Junior Miscellaneous. Oh, and School Books (textbooks), Poetry, Readers, and Easy Readers. We put a small address label on each spine with the category and the first three letters of the author’s surname, or, in the case of biographies, the subject’s surname. This way, we can find the books we want! We frequently refer to LibraryThing to find the shelf we have the book on, and the author, so we can find what we want–we’ve put a tag with each book in LT for the shelf. My oldest daughter and I spent every spare minute we could find together for the entire winter two years ago doing inventory and adding those shelf tags and the labels. Last year we went through again to inventory and make sure everything was in the right place, and we’re planning to do it again this week, and also check the tags to make sure they are up to date, because as we read the books we figure out more tags that should go with each one. This is working well for us, making our collection ever more useful to us and to others! (As an 8-10-year-old, I dreamed of working in a library. This is even better, because I can control the books that are in it!)