I read a post this morning by a friend in which she included a photo of one of her book shelves laden with books by an author whose work we both admire. I didn’t have a particular post in mind for the day (if you’ve been seeing this sudden uncharacteristic surge of posts over the past 10 days, you may be unsurprised to learn that I’m sort of quietly participating in a challenge to write a post a day this month, and you may also be relieved to learn that my gumption is not likely to outlive this month), so I figured I’d post a picture of my book shelf.

We have another set of shelves in the bonus room that houses my kids’ books (they have more than I do these days, or very nearly so) and my wife’s books. This shelf sits behind me in my office, and just about every other time I have a video chat with coworkers who haven’t seen the shelves before, somebody does sort of a doubletake and asks whether their eyes are deceiving them or whether my books are arranged by color. And, well, yes, they sort of are.

I used to organize them mostly at random, with little pockets of order. Amid the randomness you’d find all of the David Foster Wallace grouped together, and you’d find most of the slim books of poetry (now relegated to a stealth row behind the fiction) grouped together. Random shelving is easy to add books to without much fuss, and I always liked having to scan the whole shelf to find a particular book I had in mind, which often enough would remind me of something else I wanted to dip back into.

It was a few months ago that I decided to rearrange more or less in a spectrum. I forget what made me decide to do it. I think I just wanted the shelves to be pretty while retaining some measure of organization that was random in terms of book content. Chaos has already begun to set in. I’m out of room for reds and oranges and yellows and too lazy to shift the whole shebang, so here and there you can spot within or atop the shelves little flashes of bright horizontal color from a book slid in on top of the others. Some books are new and haven’t been shelved at all yet (these mostly lie on top of the shelves). I got rid of a bunch of books to free up the bottom shelf for storage of other things, and the result so far isn’t very pretty. Near bottom left are cookbooks, arranged in a more orderly fashion because even a weirdo needs some measure of pragmatism here and there.

On top of the shelves you’ll see three globes, the early members of a collection my wife is slowly building. One of the globes wears a pirate hat and wig that a coworker sent me; the companion parrot hat lies nearer the opposite ends of the shelf. At bottom right, too big to fit in any of the compartments, is my OED.

Although it has always pained me to get rid of books (I used to have a lot more than this), I’m finding myself more capable lately of paring the collection down a bit. Most of the books pictured here are ones that I really treasure or would like to read again one day (or at least have on hand for occasional reference). Whereas my collection used to be largely provisional, containing lots of things I thought I might read one day or that I just picked up used on a whim, I’ve read probably 95% of these (putting cookbooks aside) and figure they’re important enough to me that I’ll one day regret not having them on hand. I have a nasty habit of selling back a book I think I’ll never need again and then needing it desperately again within the month; I’ve bought back my own books from the used bookstore more than once.