Does anyone know where I can find a couch like the one in the second photo?

I agree, that couch is my ideal one.

We love our modified Library of Congress ordering system and are a little horrified by the color families ordering system. How could you ever find anything?

I'm not gonna lie...picture #4 makes me twitch a little. Too many stacks!

@vollhardtandschore - have to agree with you. A former job in a library has caused me to sort everything by topic or author, not color! Plus, what do you do when the spine is multicolored? Most of mine don't fit into one "color" category.

All my books are ordered by colour, which I find the most appealing visually. As Vollhardtandschore said, it's certainly not for everyone, but if you have a good memory (or just remember what books look like rather than what they are called) it works really well.

I will admit that my love of the colour ordering system comes from running a bookstore. Sometimes you need a change from alphabetization.

Karl Lagerfeld's stack upon stacks would never work for me.

Seconded! I love the order that the org by color produces. Very visually appealing.

The fourth pic gives me night terrors.

I organize my books by colour. The way I figure it, the books in the shelves are static 99% of the time, and should help complete the look of my room. The 1% of the time I spend actually looking for a particular book, it doesn't really pain me to have to hunt a little bit. Plus I kind of like the "thrill of the hunt" when I'm looking for a book - I usually stumble across something I forgot I had.

If I had a zilion books, I might have to come up with a better ordering system, but I only have a couple of hundred, if that.

And to (sort of) echo what nottonyharrison said, I have a better memory for what a book looks like than the author's name, most times.

Grouping books by color is problematic for me even though I do tend to remember what the book looks like more than the title or author (for cookbooks, especially), because the spine is almost invariably a different color than the front cover.

Really love the shelves under the stairs look in #7, but can't use it because our stairs are in a really inconvenient place for book storage and access.

@modernguy couch reminds me a lot of the Maxwell Leather Sofa at Restoration Hardware

http://www.restorationhardware.com/catalog/product/product.jsp?productId=prod80224&categoryId=cat1537037

oh my, #4 is a huge eyesore!

I arrange mine by size, with some standing up and some on their side.

Thanks Erika!

Thanks Erika!

This post just makes me warm and happy. There are so many books in our home, I dream of built-in, wall-sized bookshelves!

I like the look of by-colour, but do worry about series where the individual books are different colours (the non-us editions of Harry Potter, for example).

The Dewy decimal system, on the other hand...

#4 is just wrong - laying books on their sides is bad for the books.

Source for duvet in first photo?

Heyyyy! Great minds think alike! I just rearranged my shelves by color - not super strictly, mind you - this week! I have a before and after at http://holidayhouserules.typepad.com

"Maybe I missed my calling as a librarian, but as a lifelong bookworm I've always liked to see my paperbacks and hardcovers cared for and kept in order." A bit more to it than that, I'm afraid! ;^) (I am one.)

#4 is the collection of a person who hoards books but doesn't read them. (It is NOT bad for books to lie on their sides, in fact rare antiques should be stored that way to preserve them. However, you don't STACK them, putting extra weight on the spines.)

Stacking them makes it difficult to get a book low in the stack without either laboriously moving the ones above, or risking damage to the books by trying tos lide the desired one out.

People can do what they like with their books, but that arrangement seems contrived and pointless to me -- just a way of saying "look how different I am" which is not a message I'm interested in conveying.

With Library of Congress ordering, you usually have to first think of a topic first (i.e. "biology") which I find really intuitive. We have a lot of books, and it's immensely helpful to have a very structured system. It is, however, undeniably utilitarian, and well, not very pretty.

I am both:
a) a librarian
b) an organizer by color.

I've had enough patrons say, "Do you have the book with the red cover...?" to know that color order does work. Husband and I tried topical, but it just looked chaotic. I really, really like looking at the rainbow on the shelf and our black and white shelves look very sleek.

I want to live in that second photo.

Thank you so much for the great bookshelf collection, they are various grand and small and absolutely colourful an excellent choice and post of how to with books.

Does anyone have any idea where the print hanging over the bed in #1 is from? I've been scouring the internet to no avail, but it's "our song" so now I kinda really need to have it.

oops, didn't see the link to designsponge! Found it now. Sadly, out of my budget. But I think I found a cool alternative over at http://bespokepress.bigcartel.com... not AS fantastic, but pretty neat still.