Friday, November 7, 2008

A Little OCD Goes a Long Way

Ask anyone who has met me, and they will tell you organization is not my strong suit. But I'm a sucker for things that look pretty, so my husband (a former military man) has discovered that they best way to live with me is to come up with organizational systems that also look good. When we put in our built-in bookshelves we were inspired by the level of anal-retentiveness that went into artist Chris Cobb's sorting of the entire Adobe bookstore in San Francisco for his installation There is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World, (photo above).
We were also so awed and amazed by the gorgeous psychotic-ness of these real people's bookshelves, (the first one is from chotda on Flickr- who has that many pink books??, and the second is from Domino), that we decided to try our hand at sorting and shelving our own books by color (which turned out to be a great technique for procrastinating on unpacking our non-book-filled boxes when we first moved).

















We started by putting all our black books in the bookshelf in the corner of the living room. I love how it makes that corner look so intentional- almost as if that strip of wall was wallpapered.





In our "library" (slash office slash guest room), we opted for a "block of color" approach instead of the rainbow-spectrum. Okay, so the Dewey Decimal System it is not, but before you tell me how impractical this "system" is, I should tell you that we almost always remember what color a book is when we're looking for it. And it's so much prettier!

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