Two Book Collections Converged In An IKEA Bookcase

It's official, Sweetie and I have now merged our book collections.  We never did it at the condo because when I moved in we bought some new bookcases to accomodate my collection, and it made more sense to keep things segregated than try to integrate at that time.

It was far easier than I expected.  In part due to the fact that my traditional catalouging system was so bizarre and arcane I usually didn't know what I was doing myself, so I deferred to Sweetie.  We now have non-fiction, categorized by topic, poetry and fiction sections, then sorted by author and then title.

Non-fiction sections that exist or will without a doubt include:

• Baseball
• Sports other than baseball
• English
• Business
• Teaching
• History and politics
• Humor
• Nature
• Memoirs and biographies
• Music
• Psychology and Sociology
• Home Improvement
• Travel
• Religion and Philosophy
• Food (cookbooks and writing about food, housed in the kitchen)
• Craft (housed in my office space)
• Coffee Table Books (housed in the living room)

Although, now that I'm typing this, I may need to come up with some new sub-categorization for the religion and philosophy section.  Because who is the author of the Bible?  The Bhagavad Gita?  The Book of Common Prayer?  So many thoughts to occupy my time.

There was, of course, the "guess which books come from the boy and which books come from the girl" dichotomy in our collections.  Although I think it's a lot more "guess which books come from the business major and which books come from the english major" because the food and craft is all mine, and the sports are largely all his.  Although, that does not completely sum up the argument, and there is a case to be made for the first argument.  That case can be made in three simple words, "The Feminine Mystique."

Comments

[Abigail]

Ohhh the merging of the bookshelves!! We did this when we moved in to this condo, too. It was interesting. We have one bookshelf for fiction, one for "academic" books - old textbooks, materials for studying for our exams, etc, and then the living room bookshelves for everything else: travel, sports, home improvement, cooking, general reference, magazines, etc.

We did keep our fiction separate because I have a rather unique system for arranging my fiction and his books just don't fit well into that - so he has one shelf and I have three :)

I think ours would very much be a "which books are the finance major's, and which are the female's". Not completely sure though.

[Bud]

How about Thomas Cranmer for the Book of Common Prayer? He was the archbishop of Canterbury who compiled the first BCP. Just a thought.

[Shannin]

I have a Spiritual bookshelf in my bedroom for all those kinds of books. My favorite shelf is the one with the few children's books I kept. I love reading "The Velveteen Rabbit" every once in awhile or losing myself in the familiar stories from the Grimm brothers.

[Shanamadele]

We treat books like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Bhagavad Gita, where we cannot I.D. the authors, like anthologies, so they are filed at the end of our Religion/Judaica category. They are alphabatized by title w/in that subcategorization. (At least theoretically. Right now, everything is more jumbled than I'd like. I'm not re-ordering the books until Boy gets a little more impulse control.)