Marissa Flaxbart: Color-Coded Library, OR When Your Left-Brain and Your Right-Brain Fall in Love

I did it. I cleaned my room.

The clean-room (or even clean-house) conundrum that I face on a daily basis is this: I LOVE being in an organized, straightened space, but I can live with a mess. Add to this my excellent procrastination skills, and things go to hell; as all procrastinators know, without a deadline, all that extra time "later" never comes. There's ALWAYS something more pressing than shelving that book or deciding which magazines to keep. Almost anything in life is more time-sensitive than doing laundry. Also, cleaning after long periods of NOT cleaning makes me kind of sick, literally – I have a dust allergy. Finally, I tend to keep the rest of this apartment clutter free by putting the clutter in my bedroom. So, I've been living in a choppy sea of clothing and scattered possessions, and it's been making me very sad (but not sad enough to fix it)...until now.

All this is prologue to the feat I'm truly pleased about. Since taking all of my books off of my bookshelf so that I could move it to another part of the room (something I did this Spring), my books have been sort of jammed back in there in no real order. Organizing books is kind of a secret, OCD pleasure of mine, and before the big shelf-move they were arranged more-or-less alphabetically by subject. "Just like the library?" you may be thinking, but I have worked in multiple libraries and bookstores, and can tell you that "alphabetically by subject" is only one of several ways to arrange books. At the Center for Research Libraries in Hyde Park (Chicago), they store their books wrapped in brown paper, in temperature-controlled stacks, and arranged by size. Me? I now have a collection of books arranged by color.

Note that the books are primarily arranged by color group (pinks, reds, oranges, etc.) and secondarily arranged by height (I was silly and did small to large, large to small, for prettiness). Why? Well, I get wide-eyed anytime I see things arranged by color, or if a collection of goods (nail polish, mixing bowls, tank tops) is displayed side-by-side in rainbow order. Now, whenever I look at my little collection of unread or partially read books (the shelf is too small for books I've finished, those are in boxes waiting for me to have my own place), I just want to read them all, one by one. Or maybe lick them. But probably just read.

The hardest part of this process was adding all the books to Delicious Library and noting the spine color in the notes section, just for good measure. It was kind of fun, but also super time-consuming. But now, life will be that much easier next time I need to arrange (I think), or if I can't remember a book's spine color (unlikely). Check out the software if you're a Mac user with a lot of books, movies, or music.