Summer 2014 Bookshelf Tour Part 1: Overview/ Organization

Hey, y'all! So, I've seen lots of booktubers do bookshelf tours, but I hadn't thought to do one until just recently. However, you're actually going to be seeing three bookshelf tours in close proximity to each other! I'm currently living in a dorm room on my school's campus, and the only shelving unit I have are two shelves on top of my desk. However, at the beginning of August, I'll be moving into the apartment I'll be living in throughout my junior year of college, and I'll be getting a full, 5 shelf bookshelf. I probably won't do that bookshelf tour until late August, because I'll be traveling for some of August, as well as preparing for the upcoming semester.

The third bookshelf tour will actually be of my bookshelf at home. I'll be going home for a week next month, and since I have several books there, I thought it would be a good idea to do a bookshelf tour for that shelf. I might hold off on that post until September just because you'll be getting this one in two parts now, as well as the updated apartment one next month. Or I might hold off on the apartment one until September. We'll see.

There will be 2 parts to my bookshelf tour. This one, part 1, is a general overview of my shelves and how they're organized. In part 2, I'll be listing the books I own and whether they're read or unread.

So, this bookshelf tour will only be up-to-date for less than a month, but I wanted to go ahead and do it so that I have it documented. It's partially for my own benefit as well, to remember how I had everything shelved. So, let's jump in, shall we?

So, this is my main shelving and the vast majority of my books. I do have some overflow books, which I'll show near the end of the post, but this is pretty much the entirety of the books I have at school. As you can see, the shelves are very, very, very full. This is why I'm so excited about finally having a full bookshelf in less than a month.

All 3 of these were actually cut from shopping bags. My favorite used bookstore near my campus uses paper bags with these fun sayings on them, and I thought they were really cool, so I cut them out and put them above my bookshelf. 

I'm now going to take it one shelf at a time, saying how they're organized.

As you can see from my little hand-written label, this is my Favorites shelf! These are all the books that I really really love. It also frees up my normal shelves a bit, because these would never all fit.

As you can see, my favorites shelf is mostly just divided by Harry Potter and non-Harry Potter. I'm being just a little lenient with my non-HP stack right now, because a couple books couldn't fit on the shelves anymore. But I do really like them nonetheless.

You also might have noticed this jar. This little jar is my TBR jar. I made it last month, but because of my summer reading challenge, I haven't been able to utilize it yet. Basically, I have all of my unread books on slips of paper inside this jar and each month/ whenever I can't figure out what I want to read, I'll pull one out (with series, I only have the first book in here because it wouldn't make sense to read the second book without reading the first). I also have a couple books in here that I want to re-read, but the majority of the books in here are unread.

We now move down to my second shelf. As you can see, these are mostly organized by size, because that's really the only way to fit everything on there. There is, however, a little method to the madness, and the stacks are divided up in certain ways.

This stack on the far left is all YA series. For some of them, I have other books in that series elsewhere on my shelf, and for others, all that are in this stack are all that I have.

The next stack over is made up of mostly stand-alones, all paperback. There's a little spillover from the previous stack, with a series, but the majority of the books in this stack are stand-alones, or the only book I own in its series.

As you can see, this stack is made up of all normal-height hardcover books. I have it organized so that the bottom half is mostly stand-alone novels, and the top half is made up of books in series. In the cases of all 3 of these series, I own other books in that series in paperback, so those are elsewhere on my shelf.

Then finally, we get to my tall books stack. As you can see, the bottom half is made up of tall hardcover books, while the top half is comprised of my tall paperbacks. Any books taller than these wind up in my "oversize" shelving, which actually reminds me of work because we have a large oversize section in the library I work in.

We now move down to my bottom shelf. As you may be able to notice, this shelf is much more organized than the shelf above it. It's still organized by height, but I was able to also organize by series and genre a little bit better as well.

So, the stack on the far left is the entire Pendragon series in hardcover. The tenth book wouldn't fit on the stack, so I just had to put it beside the rest of the books.

Right next to that stack are my high-fantasy series in paperback. As you can see, there are three complete series, as well as another single book thrown on top.

The next stack on this shelf is comprised of classics and music & psychology books. And yes, I'm fully aware that a few books in this stack are not "classics" but I would classify them as modern classics, so they got put into this pile.

This stack is almost entirely made up of the books in A Series of Unfortunate Events. There is, however, one extra book on the top of this stack which is there solely because it's the same size as the books in A Series of Unfortunate Events.

 We've now come to my overflow shelving. This stack sits on the windowsill directly behind and to the right of my main bookshelf. Nearly all of these are books for school, except for the three on top.

Directly to the right of that stack, we come to my final section of books, the oversize/overflow section. A few of these are things like quiz books or list books that aren't really books in the normal sense. Then there are the books that were too large to fit on my main shelf. Finally, some of these books are ones that I didn't really want to display. And, as you can also see, this is where I keep my magazines and a few of my notebooks.


So, there you go, that's the overview of my shelves and how they're organized. You can expect the second part of this sometime next week. As I said, that will be a more in-depth view at the books and whether they're read or unread, and perhaps opinions on them. I haven't quite decided yet. I was close to making this a single post, but I know that I typically only enjoy seeing the overview and organization, and knew that it would be incredibly long with everything on here, so that's why I decided to split it up into two.

I've also created a Facebook page for my blog, so if you want to check that out and like it, you can click HERE. I'll try to keep that pretty up-to-date with new posts and such.

Thanks for reading this! If you like my posts, don't forget to subscribe/follow, since it lets me know that you're enjoying what I'm doing. See y'all soon!