Colourful stuff

Confession time...

In our home we have lots of books. Lots and lots of books. We have lots of children's books, lots of coffee table type art, gardening, architecture and graphic design plus far too many business books. My man loves them. He cant get enough. They inspire him, teach him and drive him constantly forward in business.

Living with books is all very interesting and good, but book storage is always a problem. We have had various custom bookcases built to house the ever growing collection. However once we discovered we were also collecting bookcases, we got one whopper bookcase built inside the dining room. The bookcase is awesome. Floor to ceiling, 40 open square shelves are anchored to the floor by cupboards. It's white and quite minimal with the uniform square shelves offering your eye a pattern but interest. The scale is BIG.

Next problem was how to organise the books within the bookcase?

I used to work in a Library so initially our books were categorised according to subject. Just like the Dewey decimal system. This was all fine and good until a house guest, who also worked in a library, suggested colour. This got me thinking and doing a little research. All the images I found looked awesome. So I got to work.

I started to put white spines in the centre with black at the ends, warm colour one side and cool the other. I was amazed to find that the colours were so much more vivid and alive when grouped together. My eye would travel back and forth across the row of books, where as before it just stopped. I was also surprised at the colours I found. The purples, lime greens, hot pinks and pale oranges originally lost in a sea of books, when grouped together started to sing.

On seeing his mother's handiwork B commented, "Wow isn't Mum clever?"

Our book case

(note the very top shelf is unsorted)

I am not the only one who has done this as the following images show...