how do we keep track of our books? 🌿

Hello friends! Welcome to my blog, thank you for being here. After so many reviews, I wanted to give you a different blog post all about our little home library. I am a big reader and my husband is one too, so this caused us over 1000 books when we got married. He was working in a publishing house for the past 8 years, which makes sense for him to own that many books, and I am no different; working during exhibitions for publishing houses for 6 years did make me acquire a lot of books at the end.

When we got married, we couldn’t get the bookshelf that would take all of our books due to the economy we had (bookshelves are surely expensive lol), and after almost 2 years of marriage, we both got so upset about not having our books, our world, in our home. My bookshelf in my mother’s home is fixed on the wall and carrying it was out of possibility. His bookshelves were deep (and I mean really deep, they can get two rows on each shelf) and not as “aesthetic” as I wanted but in the end, we decided to give them a chance since they were easy to carry. Before I go into all the details about my little system, I am incredibly happy that we ended up getting them because now the study I had empty for the past two years is finally coming together and I love how cosy it is already! He rarely spends time in the study and refers to the room as mine, so I will do that too. 💁🏻‍♀️💖

Here is the current situation of my study, as you can see from the pictures, I covered two shelves in white with matt folio and I will do the rest little by little since it is a very big project. I do not expect it to be finished this year but one day I will finish them and enjoy the white library once again. Until then, this is what we have and believe it or not, I love it!

Now let’s get into the purpose of this blog post. We both have so many books, how do we keep them on track? It is impossible to remember each and every one of them so there were a lot of duplicates of classics and research books when we started carrying them from our old homes (we gave the duplicates to my little sister at the end). I ended up making a library sheet on Google Drive. I’m not so good at Excel but my work requires me to be at least comfortable with it so I’ve been working with formulas and all that for the past 2 years, which helped me tremendously during this project.

This is the first thing you see once you open the sheet. I created a DATA sheet to enter the information about the books one by one. Next to the DATA sheet, you can see the different Genre sheets lined. I wanted to create a system that would help me to see each genre one by one. This way, once I want to get a new book, I can easily look up the specific genre and search for the book’s name to see whether I have it or not, whether I read it or not etc. All new info (book name, genre, publishing house and read status is entered into the DATA sheet and it is updated in every other sheet as well!

Let me explain why my DATA sheet is important: First of all, I have OCD and I need my books in ORDER. Not any order, the order that I put them to and we are living two people in the home and this library is also my husband’s. This means that if he cannot find the book he needs quickly and has to go through shelf after shelf, my order will be destroyed and I cannot accept that. 😳 This sounds very scary but it is what it is. My books mean a lot to me. Since our space is very limited, we need to stack the books on shelves that are deep enough to get two rows. Also, two of the shelf units have covers which means we cannot see what’s inside. By this DATA sheet, we can know which unit has which books on which shelf exactly, so whenever we want to get a book we can simply check the Excel file and look where are they. Perfect isn’t it?

The DATA sheet includes the book name, author, genre, publishing house, and the shelf number of the books. I simply numbered my shelves with letters (A, B, C, D…) and gave numbers for each shelf. For example, C2-2 means C shelf’s second cover and the second shelf. The sheet order is simple, I only chose column C and put an alphabetical order, this way I can see each publishing house as a group and simply ordered the series from the first book to the last book as well. It did not take a lot of time since most of the books were already listed correctly in terms of series order. You can see the series order example below with Sarah J. Maas’ books. 🌸

For the genre sheets, I used a very simple formula! The formula you see below basically takes the DATA sheet as a reference! I chose the DATA sheet’s column A for the names of the books and with everything, I used column D (genre column) to choose the books of the same genre and bring them all together to this new sheet! I made one sheet for each genre I chose. What you see below is simply my Classics/Modern Classics genre. I am thinking of adding the review status of the books as well and I will use the same formula with a new column called “reviewed” or something and add it to the genre-based sheets!

I am aware that it looks fairly complicated but I enjoyed doing this so much and it soothed the OCD in me a lot. Now I feel better about my study and the system of our books, thanks to this system, we will never get the same book twice again! Once you add a new book to the DATA sheet, it automatically updates the genre-based sheets too. I like this system a lot, and I hope one day we will have a room big enough to get all our books in one row but until that time, this will do! ✨

How do you keep track of your books friends? Let me know below, I am always open to recommendations! Until I see you in my next blog post, take care and stay safe! 🤎