I organize my fiction books by author, and then in the order they were written. I’m funny that way.
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Sorting books by color at least implies a greater value placed on books as objects than their value as resources, which really tears at my sensibilities. I love the look of a color sorted library in a non-reader’s home, but it would never fly in my house.
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I would argue that it places a greater value on them as decoration…Sir Alaistair Cook used to have his books about the US shelved geographically…With California on the left side of the bookcase and New England in the upper right corner etc…
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Visualizations of sorting algorithms are fun to watch, for a certain kind of mind. Here’s one with sound.
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FTFY.
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You’ve only done the job half way if you aren’t sorting by color, then size!
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Of course space efficiency says that size (well spine height) should be your first sort. That way you can adjust your shelving to minimize wasted space between the book and the shelf above.
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I love this site:
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Yeah, pretty as it may be (though I find the palettes presented in the foregoing Google image search to be a bit primary and off-putting, like those shelves belong in a preschool or something), I can’t help but feel a bit sad like those books are being reduced to visual pixels or mosaic tiles rather than being appreciated for the works of art they may aspire to be as literature.
But what the hell. If someone wants to arrange their books that way and can grab whatever volume they need at any moment without asking me to help them find it (“it’s somewhere down here in the mid-beiges”), then it’s no skin off my nose. But I myself need a more, shall we say, Deweyesque organizational system.
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When I built the bookcases in my previous house, I measured and built the shelves specifically to accommodate the sizes of the books I own. In the end I owned precisely one coffee-table book that couldn’t quite fit on the bottom shelf, so it sensibly lived on the coffee table.
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Yeah, this is one of those times when comparisons are virtually cost free compared to swaps.
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Has to be size then color. Some of the shelves are deeper and or taller.
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Authors and publishers take note, I love books, but if your paperback isn’t the same size as an original trade paperback of Asimov’s Foundation I will read a borrowed copy. Otherwise I’d have to reset all my paperback optimized shelving, or use up my limited tall book space.
Absurd as it sounds, this is actually true. I own ridiculous numbers of books, and re-read them a lot, but I just don’t have space in my life for the randomly sized paperbacks publishers seem to be pushing these days. What is UP with that, anyway?
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I’m betting they would be hard pressed to juggle more than 3 of them.
Based on my time working at a bookshop, the ideal way is:
- Take all of the books off the shelf & put them on a cart;
- Put them back on the shelf in alphabetical order;
- Punch any customer who dares to go near that section and mess things up
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my technique: stack books sorted roughly by ( insert criteria here ) onto the shelves, creating somewhat equal sized piles as close as you can to what you’d guess is their right spot. after all the books are distributed ( some piles will have to be on the floors next to the shelves ) move the piles around to balance things out: then start shelving and sorting.
you’ll know – and can see – what’s in each pile, and you can both pick one you want out of the pile as needed, and place arbitrary picks in the approximate spot with spaces for upcoming books if need be – without having to actually move books much after they’re shelved. you’ll probably have some gaps – but, you probably want some if you ever want to buy more books.
that’d be my only beef with pretending the act of bookshelving can be done as a strict computer algorithm. a plan is good, but no actual person could do bubble sort, quick sort, or probably even radix sort without getting bored and just skipping over middle steps as need be.
most people can sort intuitively at the large batch level, it’s only fine grained: asimov, asprin – where folks slow down.
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i also wouldnt sort my books that way, but it’s so rare – for me at least – i want to find some particular book. when i want something to re/read, i pursue or pick at random. color sorting wouldn’t change that much.
in fact… we all know you can judge a book by it’s cover so maybe fitting a book reading mood by the book cover’s color might not be far off 
My book-reading moods tend to be specific. Obviously reference needs arise specific to a given situation, so the reference section(s) need to give you a precise book as efficiently as possible. But sometimes I’m in the mood for science fiction, sometimes for Shakespeare, sometimes for biography, sometimes for knock-knock jokes. Rarely am I in the mood for something specifically out of the yellow-spined books.
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Consider Library Sort, which leaves gaps for new books and gives a policy for when to rearrange the gaps.
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I always teach radix sort in the intro algorithms class I teach. I think it’s much more interesting than quicksort.
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