I've know both kinds of academics, the hard-core "genre is crap" and the voracious "OMG BOOKS" kind.

Guess which kind I am?

I like all of it; light reading, and then getting into a book on the word level and really parsing it out. I remember distinctly my first courses in college with a really fabulous professor, really getting into the meat of some texts and despairing, "OMG, I will NEVER be able to do this" and then, of course, I was.

I remember doing a paper on Antony and Cleopatra (titled "Hips, Lips, Tits, Power: The Feminization of Antony" -- god, I loved that title and my prof cackled over it for ages -- he was this fab Shakespeare scholar with this broad-ass W. Va accent who loooooved talking about all the "booowdy" stuff in Shakespeare) and when I was consulting with the prof and telling him my idea, he just reached out and pulled a shit load of stuff of his shelves - "You need this, and that, and oh, this..." and I was all "How do you just KNOW this stuff?"

And then 15 years later, as I was doing pretty much the exact same thing for a student, and they had the exact same reaction, I felt a thrill.

But I knew English people who were all snobby and shit about anything that wasn't their area, and I just felt bad for them. All those books! All those stories!

I actually do prefer shelving everything together. It's a pain trying to figure out whether they're shelving Iain Banks in Fiction or Science Fiction.

How do people shelve stuff (books, music and video media)? If you do it by author/artist/director, do you then alphabetize the titles or do you put them in chronological? How about anthologies?

I do it by a mixture of what the book is about (esp. nonfiction), author (for the authors I have a zillion books by) and shelf size.

At work, I use the Library of Congress system, natch.

I divide my books by subject (kids lit, classics, mysteries, SF/Fantasy, general fiction, etc.), but the only section I then organize further is my romances, which I alphabetize by author. My dvds are also organized by genre (TV series, musicals, SF, action, dramas, comedies). My music is also by genre (show tunes, folk, blues, classical, then all the rest) and subdivided by performer.

Books = I separate French and English fiction and then organization is alpha by author, and within authors usually chronologically. But I don't have a ton of fiction. history/film and other academic books, childrens books and bande dessinée, and language and poetry have bookshelves and systems of their own.

Music is divided into the christmas, concert, and contemporary, with christmas being stricly chronological, and concert and contemporary being alpha by composer/artist.

Video is divided into movies and TV, and then strictly alphabetical.

I organize my books chronologically with the newest books being placed on the shelf where other books aren't or can be compressed to the sides.

I haven't done much reading since I started writing. My life is like a water bed, if I push down one place another place has to go up.

However, kind of. How do I find things? Very carefully.

This talk about organizing makes me realize that I now have my first silent film dvd (The Passion of Joan of Arc). I think I'll mix it in with my dramas (probably put it next to M) instead of giving it its own genre.

I do it by a mixture of what the book is about (esp. nonfiction), author (for the authors I have a zillion books by) and shelf size.

This--mine are separated fiction from non, and further within fiction to trashy romance, other fiction (mostly trashy thrillers), gay stuff, YA, and scifi (the bulk). Scifi is slightly more generously categorized than some libraries or bookstores, and includes some things that are possibly romance or YA, but by scifi authors, or with scifi themes. And then it's alphabetized. Or at least, it used to be. I still haven't re-done that since moving a few months ago.

And hardbacks and trade paperbacks are on their own shelves, since they don't fit.

My books are primarily organized by how often I want to reread them. DVDs are DH's department and are obsessively alphabetized (TV and box sets being given their own separate shelves).