In mid-December, I shared some Instagram Stories about the process of installing built-in shelves in our living room. One of the story-panels was a time-lapse of me filling the newly-built, painted-and-dried, bookshelves. I’m wearing pajamas and it’s a dark winter morning — you can see the light from the window change as the time lapse progresses, and the sun begins to rise. After sharing, I received a whole lot of comments from people saying how glad they were I didn’t organize the bookshelves by color. This totally surprised me for two main reasons. 1) I honestly did not realize that some people had negative feelings about books being organized by color.
2) I realized a lot of people following along on Instagram these days are not familiar with my earlier homes (why would they be?), so they didn’t know I am actually a fan of organizing books by color. They didn’t know I wasn’t trying to make a statement about book organization when I filled my new shelves. I wasn’t trying to turn my nose up at a trend. I wasn’t trying to position myself as having strong opinions about book organization.
I felt like I had somehow mislead them into thinking I was on some sort of team that didn’t like styled bookshelves, or that I think that if you have styled shelves then you’re not actually a book reader. When really, if I’m on a bookshelf team at all, it’s this one: Having books in your house is awesome! Display/organize them however you wish.
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