Library, Reorganized

The holidays are coming soon, and with it comes house guests! Which means that my office-cum-guest-room needed a serious cleaning and reorganizing.

Y'know when you have an unused space in your house? And it just collects STUFF? That was our guest room. It's still not at 100%, but we're at like, 95%, which is good. A few more trips to the thrift store and we'll be back in business. 

As part of this cleanup, I installed a new bookshelf (that I got... a year ago... for my birthday, lol.), pulled ALL of my books out of ALL of their hiding places, dusted down all the surfaces, and reinstalled them. Which means I put hands on every book on food, cooking, and food history I own. And there are a lot of them! A number were gifts that I hadn't even looked at yet. But it was so nice to review everything and not only realize all the treasures I have, but to get excited again for delving into food history of all kinds.

Pre-organizing piles. So many piles.

More pre-organizing - books squirreled away everywhere! Now the armoire holds just extra kitchen things. :D

Piles on the ground. Still life, with vacuum.

Starting to attain some semblance of order. Look at all those vintage books! <3

So nice! Top row is books by type/country. Second and third rows are vintage books in chronological order (from the 1870s to the 1980s). Bottom row is American books (1990s-present) by topic (Colonial, Shaker, Vegetarian, etc.).

A desk I can work on! The last frontier of book organizing is the birch wood shelf - those are my academic food history books and they're only loosely in order right now because I could fill a whole other shelf with them.

See the stacks? Those are more academic books. On the little bookshelf it's magazines and periodicals (spilling over onto the armoire), top shelf is food memoirs/essays, then modern food and agriculture related books, and the bottom shelf is non-food history books.

I have my books organized a bit differently perhaps than some. All of my "American" cookbooks I have organized largely chronologically. All of my "foreign" cookbooks I have organized by country/region. And then I have all of my more modern books categorized by type of cookbook - baking, dessert, Christmas (!), food preservation, old-fashioned/country, and vegetarian. 

I haven't counted them all, but I'm already planning to get more matching bookshelves (don't they look so nice?) so I can stop squirreling books away in, say, the drawers of what is supposed to be bedroom furniture. 

As you can see, I have a bit of a problem, but also a huge opportunity. :D At some point this winter I hope to update the Wassberg Food Library and do some digitizing of some of the cookbooklets in my collection to share with the world, so stay tuned!

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