Weres Wanna Know: How Do You Organize and Display Your Books?

I've recently been thinking a lot about the organization of my bookshelves and the amount of unread books I have. The other day I watched a booktube video from Holly Hearts Books in which she turned around all of her unread books on her shelves in response to the trend featured in an older article about displaying your books turned around and how so many bookish people on the internet despised the trend.

Honestly, I could care less about how others organize and display their book collections. Spines out. Turned around. Rainbow. By genre. Divided between read and unread. You do what makes you happy. Personally, I love having the spines out. Rainbow shelves are pretty but I am OCD about having series and all the books by the same author together. Other than that, my shelves don't have much organization. Things go where they fit. I did at one point try to group my books by genre and you can still see that when you look at my shelves but I gave up on that a long time ago.

I know I own a lot of unread books. Some are in boxes. Some are on my shelves. And that's not even going to count the number of unread ebooks I own on my kindle. I'm always trying to wrap my head around how many unread books I have and while I have a number I can't visualize just how many books that is other than a lot. Holly's video was so visually impactful that way so I decided I wanted to see what my shelves looked like with all of my unread books turned around. I did it and it helped me actually comprehend how many unread books I have. Of course, I documented the process as I went so I could share it with you all. It was nice to see that some of my shelves weren't too overrun with unread books but others were pretty bad.

I own six bookshelves plus a small shelf that houses my favorite manga series and graphic novels. For this post, I had to divide each shelf in half for pictures. So there's going to be a lot of photos to look at. Let's see just how bad my unread books problem is, shall we?

Out of the 61 books on these three shelves I have 36 unread. That's roughly 60% unread. I don't think that's too bad considering I have a lot of YA contemporary books on these shelves and I read one every once in a blue moon. I will say that this shelf is the worst of the six for unread books though.

These shelves are a bit better. Out of the 56 books, I have 23 unread. That's roughly 41% unread.



 On these shelves I have 20 unread books out of 70. That's 28% unread.

Out of the 58 books on these three shelves, I have 17 unread. That's roughly 29% unread.

And out of the 57 books here, I have 31 unread. That's approximately 54% unread.

Out of the 59 books on these three shelves, I have 32 unread. That's around 54% unread too.

This whole shelf has the least unread books on it. Which makes sense. It houses my Patricia Briggs, Ilona Andrews, Kevin Hearne, and Nalini Singh collections. I'm caught up on most of their major series. Out of the 66 books on these top three shelves I have 8 unread. That's roughly 12% unread.

And out of the 58 books on these bottom three, I have 4 unread. That's about 7% unread.

I've read most of my manga volumes so this shelf has mostly read books on it too. On the top four shelves, I have 5 unread out of the 104 books. That's roughly 5% unread.

On the bottom four shelves, I have 8 unread out of the 100 books. That's 8% unread.

Last shelf since I'm not going to include my manga favorites shelf because all the books on it have been read multiple times. On the top three shelves, I have 12 unread out of the 54 books. That's about 22% unread.

The bottom half of this shelf houses my Patricia Wrede and Robin McKinley collections and a lot of my favorite books from when I was a kid so I've read a lot of these. On these bottom three shelves, I have 19 unread out of the 91 books. That's roughly 21% unread.

So on these six shelves I have, overall, 834 books and volumes of manga. Out of which 215 are unread. So my total unread percentage for the book on my shelves is 26%. I don't think that is awfully terrible for such a big collection. My inventory spreadsheet, which includes the books in boxes and not the manga, says I own 812 books out of which I have 282 unread for 35% unread. 

For as large as my personal library is, that's not too bad. I would love to get that unread percentage under 30% by the end of the year though. I don't think I'll keep my shelves like this forever and it'll probably change soon as I rearrange my shelves and organize them better. I still don't know how I'm going to reorganize them but it's been nice to visually see how many unread books I have.

How do you organize your bookshelves? Do you have a lot of unread books like I do?

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