… and one room where I can stand and say that every book is accounted for.
From left to right:
The Virago Bookcase contains all of my green Virago Modern Classics. The more recent editions live in the next bookcase along and the my Virago Travellers and Biographies live upstairs.
The skein of yarn on the second shelf up is the closest to Virago green and I have, and I keep it there for that reason, and because it amuses me that the shade is promenade and I live on a promenade
The next bookcase has a lovely assortment of fiction, history and literary biography. I gave up trying to keep order long ago, and learned to love the random!
And then there is the Persephone bookcase. There is some order here, with the dove grey covers sorted in publication order. I had half a shelf free at the end, so a couple of GreyLadies, several Honno Classics, and some Valancourt Books live here too.
The pile of books on the left has duplicate titles that I will pass on to other collectors once I have a job and an income to pay for the postage.
And on the right you will see some palm leaves. My fiance plans to shred them to wrap around a bare patch where the wicker is gone. A good idea and a good match, but I’ll believe it when I see it!
Finally you can see the corner of a double glass-fronted bookcase. It holds two shelves of little paperbacks – a lot of numbered Penguins and some of their lesser know contemporaries. Plus a deeper shelf at the bottom shelf that holds more recently published books, including some Hesperus Classics and the Bloomsbury Group.
The boxes on the top hold circular needles and other knitting paraphernalia.
Briar watched me intently for a while, but she couldn’t work out what I was doing, so she wandered off, chewed up a small pine cone, and then settled down to sleep.
I was pleased to find fewer uncatalogued books than I had feared, and I picked up so many books that I want to read, or reread, right now.
I’ll never give up the library, but I need to visit a little less frequently, and I want to plan less and read a little more spontaneously.
Next I do the books in the living room, and then I have a grand plan to implement for my upstairs books.
Watch this space!
Fleur in her World 
Oh, very neat and orderly! Just as I like books to be. I am considering putting all my green Viragos together; they are currently mixed with general paperback fiction A-Z, but my Persephones are in a revolving bookcase, all neatly standing together. I began buying each one as it was published but had to give that up as I was getting far more books than I’d ever read and also, i didn’t really want all the titles, so now only buy the ones I really want. I have other ‘collection’ sections, too, and a large one (number of books, not space taken) is my Shire Books collection (www.shirebooks.co.uk) as I’ve now in excess of 200 titles, but as they are slender volumes they take up little space. I would recommend them to anyone as the first port of call for information on all manner of subjects.
Margaret P
I have finished cataloguing all of mine now on to goodreads! But I have yet to bring order to my shelves where the books sit, spill and spit all over the floor!
But when I am choosing a book I like to root around the ones I have.
So organised! My books are all over the place which is terrible considering I used to work in libraries. It can take me ages to find a particular book. When I move I’m going to sort them all out properly. I have all my Viragos together on a couple of shelves, I don’t know how that happened!
Margaret has 200 Shire books! I only have 2 – crested china and Mauchline ware.