The Asymmetric Library

This is a blog about alternative ways of organizing the books in your bookshelves. It is mainly about the different weird, imaginative, slightly mad systems I have come up with for my own bookshelves - primarily for the fiction books - but I will also write about weird, imaginative and slightly mad systems others have come up with.

Organizing fiction books is more challenging than organizing non-fiction. Non-fiction is often primarily about one subject, so you can group together books on the same subject, classify and categorize them and achieve order. Fiction is wilder. Therefore, it wants to be organized in wilder ways. It also wants to be reorganized every now and then so that it can meet new neigbours, see new things. And I am happy to oblige.

Also, it is so much fun to organize books!

I have, on occasion, actually organized my bookshelves alphabetically by authors' last names. But it's been done, and it's predictable, and it's symmetric. Asymmetry is good for the soul.

And yes, I do have a master's degree in Library Science.