Color co-ordinating your books

We've all seen pictures of color co-ordinated bookcases in fashionable design magazines, right? They look fabulous and create a great visual element in a room that with an ordinary bookcase would look, let's face it, ordinary. So when a friend of mine a few years ago moved we suggested she organize her books by color. Now she's a very visual type of person so she decided to give it a go and I have to admit her bookcase looked pretty darn fab by the time we were finished with it. She says she can find her books, so I suppose it works for her.

Now encouraged by this positive role model I decided to try it myself. I'm sort of living in two places: my old house where I used to live and my new house in the city where I work. Being a manic book lover I've got plenty of books in both places. The old house has 3 pretty big bookcases organized by genre and alphabetized by author, so I wasn't going to start with messing that up. But with so many books some of them are in two rows and they're not organized by anything, so they became the perfect target for my experiment.

I was and still am pretty pleased with how they turned out. I tend to fill this bookcase with books I've already read, so finding them isn't really an issue.

With one successful project behind me I now turned to the bookcase in the city where I work and live. Now this one I share with my darling partner, so I not only had my own books to sort out but his as well. And much as you'd expect, there were more of them, too. But in the end I think it turned out quite well. In fact it looks exactly like the other one, doesn't it?

The trouble only started once you tried to find a particular book. Now the problem with living in two cities simultaneously is that you can never be 100% sure the thing you're looking for isn't in fact in the other place. With my new order finding books became almost an impossibility. Sure you thought you remembered what color the book was, yellow, right?  Only it wasn't the spine, it was the cover and the spine was black. Or red. Or even blue. And then when you can't find what you're looking for you wait until you're going back for the weekend to your old house only you won't find it there either because it turns out you've stuffed the book into a cupboard.

We're moving now and last week my hubby said to me: Honey, when we move can we have the books by subject again? I can never find my books anymore...