The farthest I’ve gone with the book thing was to sort by color. Even weirder is buying books “by the foot” in various color themes. Not meant to be read, I guess. I just gave away almost all of my books while downsizing. Only kept a few favorites.

I think it was done for "commercial" reasons---So as not to promote a particular title on TV. Same reason they wrapped the books in white or brown craft paper.

And then it turned into a decorating "trend."

I can't stand it. It's seems phony and staged. I've always suspected it had something to do with wanting to have the appearance of books, but also wanting to keep the color palette neutral.

I've never seen books backwards on shelves, but then I never watch Joanna Gaines, since I think her interiors are hideous - especially when text is used as a decorating element. Also, I have some extremely bad and painful memories about Waco - that is where I had my wisdom teeth extracted.

Here's another question about books: do you alphabetize or otherwise sort your books as they would be in a library? I used to do that with record albums, and I always sorted them from right to left because the text was printed so that when I turned my head, the right side would be at the top. Books in the U.S. and England are the same, but in Germany, the text is rotated 180° so that when you look at the splines on the shelf, it is easier to read from left to right. However, when the book is on the table, the spline text would then be upside down. I prefer the German method of printing spline text.

Ours are sorted first by genre i.e. fiction, biography, design, food, history, etc, then alphabetized by author and publish date. We have nice size collection, and this is the only way to find something when we want it.

I love books but from a housekeeping perspective find them to be a pain. Thus, using just for decoration with the beige pages would be ludicrous. Our books are generally sorted into categories on shelves. There are history (world and U.S. each have their own shelf), biography, classic literature, one shelf for Dumas, another shelf for my "fun fiction," etc. Another bookshelf has kids books that are sorted into picture, books, topics as studied for homeschooling (politics and history, science, religion, etc.). DH came up with the brilliant idea of using the air compressor to remove dust from the tops of the books. Each year they all come off the shelf, I hold the books out the window and blow the dust. What I wouldn't do for some barrister bookcases!

ETA: Within genre, books are sorted by size. Alphabetizing by author would be nice, but visually is hard on my eyes.

I loosely sort my books by topic. I don't care about colors but I do like the shelves to look pleasing and balanced so I may take a tall book that would stick out in a row and turn it sideways and put a few books on top.

I just put them on the shelves. When I'm looking for a particular one, it forces me to look around and sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised to find a book I've forgotten about.

As far as spines in on shelves, it totally negates the purpose of having books. You might as well put empty cardboard boxes on the shelves, I think it's that stupid.

I recently saw this "Backwards books" thing in a magazine or on a blog. Apparently, it's a "trend"...a trend for people who never read a book. Preposterous!

I have so many bookshelves in my house, that they are first sorted by room in the house, then in each room, by genre, then by author, and then by date of publication (i.e. all the John le Carre books are in the order in which they were published - same for PD James and Dick Francis etc).

I re-read my books all the time, and also use them for reference. Yes, I DO have too many, but it's so hard to even give books away these days - public libraries will not take them and even university libraries are very picky. I guess my children will just have to get a dumpster, which to me is a sacrilege, but they certainly do not have room for them - lots of books of their own.

I agree about the absurdity - and preciousness - of such a conceit. How would you ever find anything?

Unless of course you're never looking for a book.

Loosely by subject, but other than that, it's all higgledy-piggledy = J

I'm w/ Olychick, I enjoy random discoveries.

They're simply accessories to these people. And of course the colors must mesh with the overall color scheme. They don't value books as BOOKS.

The books in our library are sorted by genre.*Mostly non-fiction except for our Tolkien section and Dune series.

Oh, and spines in France are also printed opposite of those in the US, so those are shelved upside down!

* ETA genre and historical period/subject as in WWll, Revolutionary era, Art, reference (such as dictionaries, word origins, etc), politics, poetry, ...

ETA 2. No organization for stacks of books in bedrooms, den, family room, etc.

I have a system that makes perfect sense to me but I'm not sure about the rest of the world lol

The books I love/value the most go to the shelf where they are most easily reachable. Then they get divided by topics/genres . Then within the topics, I'll try to make some sense with color, so it's very easy for me to spot it as I'm a visual person.

I repeat it with every shelf..some books I know we'll reference less, will go in closed cabinets. (which are somewhat overflowing mess to say the truth.) We have a mix of closed and open storage in our bookshelves. Albums, documents, old letters-all in drawers.

CD's and DVD's have cabinets and drawers dedicated to them on the second part of the shelving, dedicated to TV etc.

I also have special shelves for smaller sized books there, be it hardcover or softcover

That's in the family/library

In living, it will be books that are compelling to everybody..like design, art, photography, history..and there I also keep my widely popular "Complete Book of Dreams" (found on some garage sale I think). lol.

Then my daughter has books in her bookcase , my son has books (had to buy a stupid new etagere for that, because of the very limited size had to be shallow, narrow, whatnot), and we also have books on all surfaces in our bedroom, and it's definitely our weak spot. Resisting buying books. I don't read from screen though, hurts my eyes, Made several exceptions for couple truly great books ..but if I could source them differently I'd still buy a paper version.

Some books, I stacked in the secretaire in the guest room, easy reading for guests (even though they're welcome to pick any), like short detectives and such.

I also lay books horizontally when makes sense.

I have no system, and have disposed of many books (they were my husband's and all about military history and wars) to make room for my collection of Chinese porcelain (with his permission of course). I never knew who Joanna Gaines was until there was a thread about her here, and if that's what she does with books I don't really need to know more.

I have all my late DH's books on Japan (he spent 2-3 years there in the Navy in the late 1960's), and Russia (he was a Russian Studies major at Yale). There there are all of my father's genealogy books. I'd love to find homes for all of these, but no takers.

I think if you are decorating with books in a purposeful way to add color and texture I don't think the trend is that offensive. It's an offshoot of coffee table books. Or using books to raise a table lamp. Or buying bulk books to fill a library. The reading is secondary to the use of color and shape. Backward books are better than throwing them in a landfill.

And let's face it, there are a lot of books out there that really aren't worth reading. I'd take every Fifty Shades and Twilight book I could find and turn them backwards on my shelf :)

I have stacks of coffee table books and books that prop up porcelain but I still read those too. I don't buy books that I'm not going to read or look at over and over.

We have books all over the house. Books written by relatives are in the family room.

Books written by relatives are in the family room. I love it.

Just when I think nothing could surprise, some new fresh hell is foisted on me....ugh.

I have most books sorted by genre, except in my bedroom, where they are sorted by what I am currently most interested in. I have a lot of German books, and so I store the American books upside down, as I prefer the German method of spline reading.

We are in the process of storing all of our DVDs in binders and discarding all the cases, as they just take up too much space. My brother works for Sony Pictures, and he gets free discs all the time (some of which we give away), but we also have our own large collection, started mostly from when we decided not to have cable TV. We now have cable TV again, but we still buy DVDs and do not have time to watch everything. My brother also has the DVD inventory on his computer and in the cloud, so that I can access it and avoid buying something we already have. It would be nice to do that with books as well, but for the DVD database he can scan the barcode, and all info goes into the program he bought for inventory.

I have a few books that I should get rid of, but I'm not sure of the best way to do it. As noted above, libraries do not always want them. I used to work at the UT library in Austin (Main Building) cataloging a Slavic literature collection that was obtained from donations, and I'm sure some of the books (especially the ones in Bulgarian) would never get checked out. I got that job because I knew enough Russian to read title pages and transliterate the Cyrillic alphabet for sorting. I did not do the sorting - I just looked up the Library of Congress numbers based on author and title. It was a boring job - I only did it for six months soon after graduation.

When I was getting my design degree, I would go to the architecture library to do research for my History of Architecture class (we had to do two books reports per week), and I checked out a lot of books that no one else had every checked out or else very few people. Most of them were in Italian, but some were in German, and when I took a class on History of Greek Art, a large percentage of the books were in German, which few people checked out. What is odd is that my architecture professor could not read Italian, and the Greek art professor could not read German, and so they missed out on a lot of good books.

Libraries often do not want to pay to catalog donated books.

Wait a minute. This is not new. It may be stupid, but it's not new. Ms Gaines did not invent this either. I used to subscribe to decorating magazines including AD, and it was not at all uncommon to see. I stopped subscribing years ago!

Indigo Rose - You're right! I just spent way too much time looking at online Fixer Upper rooms and in all but one the books are turned with spines out, as they should be. In just one room Gaines has turned a few books (out of several, behind glass doors on shelving) with pages out.

Even Pottery Barn at one time showed a few rooms with pages out. I think their fans let them hear about that, because it was a very brief fad!

I've seen the backward books for years before the Gaineses. It's just for decor. Not everything they do is for practical use. I saw an episode where they designed a home for a family where two little boys use wheelchairs, and the desks and sinks Joanna designed were at their chin level, totally not usable for several years at least.

Now, as to book organization, it all depends. I do a combo of genre, author, color, age, number in series, binding edge design, whatever works. Sometimes I can do them all at once! I recently rearranged my mom's cookbooks by color, and I love it. She doesn't cook anymore, so appearance matters now more than type of dishes.

I'm a visual kind of gal, so only certain books need to be in alphabetical order.

Whatever works, is good. But the backwards books is only for looks...and for books that you worry about your friends (or mother) judging lol!

Which would be the most unnerving to visit-- a house with no books or one with all the books with the spines to the wall?

I’m a huge reader/lover of books. We not only have a dedicated Library, but built-in bookcases in both our kids’ bedrooms. As young adults, they’ve since taken their personal libraries with them to their own homes. Because we are all major readers, I can’t imagine turning book spines to the back. BUT, as Pudgeder suggested, it’s probably to keeping it generic for commercial reasons. IRL, I can’t imagine doing that .

Our library has a Friends of Books group where they take any books you may want to donate and resell at very low prices. The sales are about every 6 months, are well organized and raise money for various causes. Perhaps they are sometimes used for decor but better than the landfill. I have made some very good finds there.

I forgot. Here's how I arrange mine:

We have close to 3,000 hardbound books. There are bookshelves all over the house. They are catalogued in a software program that we take with us when shopping to avoid duplicates (but there are a few). Books are organized by genre, author, release date.

Spines out.

This article was in The Chicago Tribune Life & Style section just last week.

Organizing your bookshelf this way should be illegal

BTW, I totally agree with the author - it should be illegal! :-)