Color Coded

Some time ago a friend linked me to an art installation where an artist had taken over a small bookstore (in San Fransisco I believe) and resorted all of the books by color. The idea has taken hold in the design realm where it seems that everyone has a bookshelf or bookcase sorted by color.

This method always stuck me as rather odd. After all, being a big fantasy reader, many of my books are long series (which are, of course, properly stored together in sequence) and have multicolored spines. However, while organizing our bookcase last night I took a look at this mess:



and, lacking any other real way to organize them, decided what the heck. So I sorted them out by color and was surprised to see just how colorful our library of mismatched, one off books really was.



Getting them onto the bookcase was a bit of a challenge since I only had one large shelf and we have far too many books to leave empty space on the shelves. Eventually I struck upon an arrangement that was fairly stable, accessible, and pretty.



Best of all, it lives quite harmoniously with the sequentially organized series above. In fact, I like it so much, that I am debating swapping the color coded books with the double stacked series on the top shelf.