I Can't Possibly Do This

Little Willow has a shelving meme up. While I think I completed a meme about shelving sometime in the past, I took one look at this one and was instantly overwhelmed.

While I do make attempts at organizing, the organizing is done, I guess you'd say, in bits--there are bits of this kind of book here and bits of that kind of book there. And what is the first and last titles on my bookshelves? Which is the beginning and which is the end?

We have beautiful built-in bookshelves in our living room. Quite honestly, an awful lot of their shelf space goes to videos and CDs along with the equipment to play same, and we have two shelves of photo albums and scrapbooks. (A sign, of course, that we are very old, since it takes a while to acquire that many.) We have an entire shelf dedicated to freeweights, stretchy bands, and other such exercise equipment. And I have a half a shelf of walking journals.

We figure we've got a couple of thousand books somewhere in the house, but...how are they shelved? And, even, what do we have?

Owning books, I've found, is one hell of a lot of work. Last summer I spent a significant amount of time removing books from shelves, dusting, and trying to prune the collection. How long had it been since I'd done this? Well, let's just say that the dust was so thick that we discovered that the young relative who was helping me has some kind of contact allergy to it.