Saturday 26 January 2013
Sorting the bookshelves
Once upon a time, there was an agile career woman who kept beautifully organised bookshelves. Happily she went on to extend her family a little. Sadly, this meant the bookshelves became a debacle.
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| Your books deserve better than this |
The smallest member of the family developed an interest in books very early. In response, we moved the books up one shelf. And then he grew. The books went up again. Thank goodness he got bored with pulling books off shelves at this point, as the top heavy nature of the bookcases was getting a little on the dangerous side.
The problem with a little bit of disorganisation is that it seems to attract a whole lot more disorganisation and clutter. And where there's clutter, doing just enough is a lot harder. Something had to be done.
As a reader, I want my books sorted alphabetically by author so I can easily find what I want to read.
The acceptance criteria for this is dead simple. It's done when the books are on the shelf, sorted by surname, ascending. Very easy to test.
Unfortunately the number of books had increased significantly, and I couldn't fit them all back once they were standing up nicely. While I'd love to buy another bookcase, it's really not in the budget at the moment. Clearly some of them had to go.
Surprisingly, it hasn't been that hard to choose what to get rid of. Books that were once absolute favourites just didn't seem quite so appealing on reflection. In reality, a lot of them have become clutter. I've packed them in plastic boxes and listed them on fishpond.com.au - my favourite Australian online booksellers.
With the clutter out of the way, getting the books back on the shelves was a doddle. All of the spines are facing the right way, fiction and non-fiction are separated, everything is in alphabetical order. Dusting is going to be a whole lot easier from now on. I could go a step further and sort the non-fiction by subject then author, but the point is to do just enough. So I'm calling this one done.
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