You might have seen my new favorite feature in our apartment from last week’s High Five for Friday post – my color-ordered bookcase!  I’ve seen plenty of intriguing pins featuring the “chromatic arrangement” of books… AKA rainbow order… so with a blank bookcase and boxes of books, I decided to give it a try.   I love the results!

But first, a few of the pins that inspired me:

 

 

There’s not much to it… but here’s my rendition!

Organizing Books by Color

Time: 1-2 hours

Cost: Free!

Supplies:

• empty bookcase
• books

Instructions:

Create stacks of books with spine colors of each color of the rainbow.  In addition to ROY G BIV, I also made stacks of white, ecru/beige, brown, grey, and black spine colors.

 

 

Start arranging books on the bookcase!

My general color spectrum went in this order: White, Ecru/beige, Pink, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Brown, Grey, Black.  Of course there are lots of ways to arrange them in the most pleasing order, but that’s what made sense to me.  It’s all up to your interpretation of each color… yellow could also be beige or brown… but I tried not to overthink it too much.  And of course, it’s hard to resist switching a book or two every time I pass by!

 

 

 

The con is definitely splitting up series of books, but since my collection only fills two bookcases I decided it was still worth it.  I probably wouldn’t attempt this project if I had thousands of books to organize… too many hours and it would be too hard to find the book you want unless you remember exactly what color the spine is (which often doesn’t match the cover).  But the pro is that it’s just plain pretty!  And for a small collection, it’s a painless project with a fun result!

Once again, hooray for Pinterest!