Conceptual colour order

One (or several) steps beyond ordering your books by the colour of the spine, there's conceptual colour order. It begins easily enough: All the titles with colours in them, like White Cat and Shades of Grey and Red Harvest and, when you start to think a little broader, The Amber Spyglass and Gravity's Rainbow, you order by colour; and then you do the same with author names like T. H. White and Holly Black.

That takes care of some of your books. Then you take the titles with things that share visual connotations. The titles with 'glass' in them, e.g., could stand with titles with words like 'invisible' and 'transparent'. And titles with 'sun' could stand with the yellows and oranges and golds, and 'moon' with the silvers, and so on.

After that, it gets a bit more difficult. What to do with the others? Stay stubbornly with the titles, and decide which colur you should most closely associate with Fury or Fragile Things or all those books with protagonists' names for titles? Or should you take the easy way out and go by the colour on the spine for those? Or should you go by the colour first mentioned inside the book, or a colour that plays an important part in the book? Well, decide for yourselves. That's where I got stuck when I tried it myself. It was going quite well up until then. (I think the most common colour in my shelf was black, when I put all the 'night' and 'dark' and 'shadow' titles there too.)

If you get stuck too, you don't necessarily have to give up. You can change tracks and go for Thematically by title words instead.