I have twenty-five book zones in my home.
Living room shelves one through four – and that’s the main living room shelf. School room shelves. The kids’ personal shelves. A drawer under my bed in the master bedroom that somehow became its own ecosystem. Shelves in the entryway hall. A tower bookshelf with cookbooks. I know this is a lot. I am not currently accepting feedback on this.
I strongly relate to Mr. Benedict in chapter 5 of the first Mysterious Benedict Society book.
“The house was a jumble of books. They were everywhere: on shelves, on tables, on the floor in stacks that reached as high as the windows. Some were open, some were closed, and many were used as coasters for tea mugs. In fact, there was hardly a spot in the room not occupied by a book, a tea mug, or a person. The children were led into a large sitting room where every available surface was cluttered with more of the same, and there, sitting in a high-backed chair, was the man they had come to see.”
Thank you, Trenton Lee Stewart for understanding me…
There’s actually a Japanese word for the particular joy of accumulating more books than you can read and loving them anyway – tsundoku. I didn’t know I needed a word for this until I had it, and now I feel deeply understood even more…
The trouble with twenty-five zones is that they require a system. We organize by genre – except genre gets philosophically complicated fast.
For example, is this book prayer or self-application? Is apologetics its own shelf or a subset of theology?
Is C.S. Lewis literature or Christian living? (Yes. The answer is yes.)
And then there’s the lent-copy problem, which came to a head when a family member who shall remain nameless – a genuinely generous person – lent one of my G.K. Chesterton books to a friend. It came back with indentions on the cover, as someone had written notes on top of the cover and the pen impressions pushed through. We replaced it with a pristine copy and the old one found a new home rather than returning to the shelf in dishonor.
It was a gracious resolution. But it clarified something: I needed a catalog.
The Problems We Were Actually Solving
Before I tell you how we built the catalog, let me tell you why we needed one – because it’s probably more relatable than you’d think.
The lent-copy problem. Books sometimes leave this house in good faith to “help” someone and occasionally return changed by their experiences. The “lent to” column in our new catalog will exist entirely because of this.
The duplicate purchase problem. We’d buy a book we already owned because we couldn’t find it and assumed it had gone to live with someone else – see above. It had not. It was on Shelf 3 of the big living room shelf. It had been there the whole time.
The edition problem. This one matters more than people realize. There’s a real difference between the original edition of a book and a revised anniversary edition with additional content – like Tactics by Greg Koukl, which got a significant update. If you’re recommending a specific edition to someone or looking for particular content, you need to know which version is actually on your shelf.
The genre overlap problem. When a book could legitimately live in three different sections, someone has to make a decision and then remember that decision. That someone was me. My memory is not infinite.
The “has anyone actually read this” problem. We have books that have been on the shelf for years. Have I read it? Has my husband? Have the kids? Nobody knows. The book sits there, quietly judging us. I *think* I read it but I don’t remember character so-in-so, so I’d better read it again… Or just check the library spreadsheet!
How We Actually Built It
I used Claude – the AI – to help me think through the structure. We talked through what I actually needed to do with this catalog: find books fast, track loans, identify editions, know who’s read what, publication year, publisher (different copies of the same book are sometimes republished)…
Claude helped me build a column structure that fit how my brain works(!) and how our library is actually organized, rather than some generic template that would have frustrated me within a week.
A word of advice here, from painful experience: use Claude for this project. I tried using Gemini for part of it, hoping to spread the work across different tools, because I’m on the Claude Free Plan and kept being cut off.
Gemini hallucinated books onto my shelves that do not exist. Even from photos!! It confidently told me I owned several L.M. Montgomery titles I absolutely do not have – which, honestly, I wish were true, but they’re not – and a collection of Elisabeth Elliot books that appeared from nowhere. I have no idea where it got any of that. No matter how many times I uploaded new photos of the same space, it kept getting those titles wrong. Arguing is useless.
Claude was precise. It cataloged what I actually told it I had and nothing else. For a project like this, hallucinated books are genuinely worse than no catalog at all.
One honest caveat: I’m on the free plan. That means Claude has usage limits, and a library this size is not a one-afternoon project. It took us several days, working in sessions when the free plan allowed.
That’s still significantly better than handwriting every title or typing everything manually from scratch – but set your expectations accordingly. This is a slow and satisfying project, not a quick one.
Think of it like a good long novel. You don’t rush it.
Enjoy the process and remembering what books you actually have!
The Photo Shortcut That Saved Us
I’m proud of myself for coming up with this approach… I went shelf by shelf and took photos of the book spines.
Then we could reference those photos while cataloging, rather than hauling books off shelves one at a time. For spines that were readable in the photo, we worked from the image.
For spines that were too narrow, too dark, didn’t have writing, or just inscrutably fonted – which is more of them than you’d expect – I voice-texted the titles in while looking at the actual shelf. A combination of spine photos and voice-to-text made the data entry so much less tedious than it would have been otherwise.
Is it still a project? Yes. We have twenty-five zones!! But it’s a manageable project, not an overwhelming one.
What the Catalog Actually Includes
We thought through every piece of information that would actually be useful rather than just technically complete. Here’s what ended up in the spreadsheet:
Title and author – the obvious ones.
Genre and subgenre – primary and secondary, so a book can be both theology and apologetics without getting lost in the shuffle. Nothing lives in only one category in this house.
Edition and version – so I know whether I have the updated Tactics or the original. One of my favorite fields because it solves a real and specific problem.
Shelf location – using our zone system that I developed. Now searchable. Now findable without a small archaeological expedition.
Lent to – the column I wish I’d had years ago. If a book leaves this house, it gets logged. The drink-ring situation (that happened to me! argh! who does that to someone else’s book?!) or the pen-writing-over-the-cover will not repeat itself… fingers crossed.
Read by – and this one might be my favorite addition. I made checkboxes for each family member. Have I read it? Has my husband? Have the kids? Now we know. No more books silently judging us without accountability. (The number of books nobody has read yet is humbling. We’re working on it.) Some things you think you read but did you? Do you actually remember it? May be time to read it again…
Notes – for anything else. Signed copies, reading order in a series, sentimental provenance.
And: spine color.
I added a spine color column on the theory that someday I might get sufficiently motivated to organize a section of the shelves by color, the way you see in those gorgeous shelfie photos.
However, that day has not yet arrived. I have approximately seventeen other projects going. But the data is there, waiting patiently, should inspiration ever strike.
This is what I call aspirational organization.
Should You Do This?
If you have a large collection and any of the following apply – yes, absolutely.
You’ve bought a duplicate. You’ve lost track of a lent book. You have a genre that could arguably live in three different sections. You have children with their own shelves and you want one unified system. You care which edition of something you own. You have a family member who is wonderfully generous with your bookshelves.
The barrier is lower than it looks. You don’t need an app – most of the polished ones where you can take photos are built for Apple anyway, and the Android options want you to scan every ISBN individually, which would take approximately one million years in my house.
Each one also costs money! And then your book list is owned by some company somewhere! That feels too intrusive to me… And, I have to keep paying them to access what I already own?
No, thank you, please!
You don’t need a subscription. You need a spreadsheet, Claude to help you think through the structure, and a few unhurried sessions going shelf by shelf.
Take photos of the spines first. Voice-text what you can’t read. Work in sessions. Use Claude specifically – not because I’m sponsored (I wish I was but I’m not, I’m on the free plan like everyone else… Anthropic, if you *want* to sponsor me, Here I Am!), but because precision matters here and Claude was the only tool that cataloged what I actually have rather than inventing a wishlist. Of things I didn’t want. Or didn’t actually exist…
The L.M. Montgomery collection of my dreams does not yet exist on my shelves. But now I know exactly what does!
And if you, like me, have an inordinate number of designated book zones in your home and are not currently open to discussing it or downsizing, however appealing the concept was when you read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizingy – I laughed at the book section… you are supposed to own 25 books or something like that, not have 25 zones. I have 25 on my nightstand area, lady! And, I like it!
Anyway, tsundoku is the word you’ve been looking for. You’re welcome.
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