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There are nearly as many <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/home/2023/03/03/how-to-organize-books/" target=_blank>ways to organize your books</a> as there are genres of literature: alphabetically; by author, topic, time period or geographic area; or with any number of other useful categories.

Then there’s organizing books by color, the mere mention of which sends many bibliophiles into a blind rage.

The idea of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/how-to-display-your-books-when-space-is-tight/2019/09/10/f59735ae-c9a2-11e9-a4f3-c081a126de70_story.html" target=_blank>displaying your books</a> like a rainbow isn’t new; Charles Almonte, a designer in Silver Spring, Md., says that he’s seen the look in historical photographs, and that was before jacket art took a very bold and colorful turn. Social media has amplified the concept over the past 15 years, offering cranky bibliophiles a forum to hate on color-coded shelves. When GoodReads <a href="https://twitter.com/goodreads/status/1003441212156710914" target=_blank>asked its Twitter followers if they were for or against organization by color</a>, naysayers responded with one theological objection (“heresy”) and a much more common accusation: “No one who loves to read would ever do this.”

Even some designers don’t like the look. “It looks very staged for me,” Almonte said in an email. “It looks good in photographs. … But in reality, I don’t think it’s practical or logical.”

As an avid reader and an English major with a pretty big collection, I’ve generally organized things by genre and period. But would it be so bad to arrange these treasures by hue? Would it be frivolous for Ann Patchett to live next to Jane Austen and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/interactive/2023/stephen-king-home-library/" target="_blank">Stephen King</a> if their covers all happened to be blue?

I asked a book-loving colleague to organize her collection by color and report back. I also rearranged my own collection. Here’s what we learned from this extremely low-stakes experiment.

Megan Erickson

Megan Erickson, 29, a senior brand strategist at The Washington Post, has always organized her books, mostly literary fiction, alphabetically by author but was willing to give a rainbow array a shot. She arranged her approximately 250 volumes across four wide shelves in one long rainbow, starting with red and ending with white.

The process — taking all of her books down and sorting them into color piles — took longer than she expected, and it presented mental hurdles too. “I didn’t realize how much dissonance I would feel separating authors from each other,” Erickson says. “Different authors going into different color blocks … felt wrong to do.”

Within a week, Erickson had decided it wasn’t working. Even seeing the shelf out of the corner of her eye while watching TV, she says, is distracting. It just doesn’t feel like her.

“It feels more like an art installation than anything, and it’s beautiful, and I like the new structure, but I think it’s a little bit more of an aesthetic choice than I would make with my books again,” she says.

She plans to switch it back in the coming months, when she has a chunk of time to sit down with a glass of wine and sort through everything again. On the upside: She realized how many of her books have been languishing on her “To Be Read” list, and this exercise has motivated her to get to work on that.

I spent about two hours reorganizing my collection of more than 600 books. I pulled everything off the shelves in multiple rooms and sorted things into various piles. I have one large unit in my living room with three smaller sections and 12 shelves, plus regular Ikea-style bookcases in our primary and guest bedrooms.

For the living room, I started on the left with red and snaked my way through each section in rainbow order, ending with white. I moved all of the black books and my childhood favorites (Nancy Drew, Narnia and Little House on the Prairie, among others) to the bedrooms.

I expected to hate it. But I kind of … loved it.

Yes, it was weird to separate multiple books by one author. I have probably five novels by Barbara Kingsolver, none of them the same color. Some of the juxtapositions in the new order are also a little odd: Emily Dickinson’s letters now live next to Lisa See’s latest novel. But I didn’t lose my mind over it. And it’s not like I have thousands of books, requiring a high-stakes cataloguing system. It turns out that when I go looking for a book I have read in the past, I often do remember what color it is.

Will I keep it? I don’t know. I would be pretty irritated if a used-book store arranged its offerings this way, because who shops for a green book? (Other than the people who buy boxes filled with books of a certain shade on Etsy to create a curated look.) But sorting them by color has created a nice focal point in my living room. It’s less jumbled and looks a little more like a place of honor, reflecting what my books mean to me.

Two readers, two attempts to organize by color, two different results. What did we learn? That our feelings about books are complicated? Or maybe that they aren’t?

While it’s fun to post beautiful pictures of rainbow books and maybe even more fun to get mad about it, it’s also possible to not care how you or anyone else arranges their books. Or you can have a foot in both camps. Another colleague, Sushmitha Tamilselvan, 26, says that her partner convinced her to rearrange part of her collection by color last summer and, much to her surprise, she loves it.

Tamilselvan, a product manager who has an undergraduate degree in library and information science, likes to arrange her books by genre, then alphabetically within each category. She was dead set against a rainbow reorganization. But when her partner suggested organizing just one genre in one area by color — the romantic comedies in their living room — it felt like a workable compromise. All her fantasy books remain grouped by series or author in another room.

“It works for both of us,” she says. “She’s happy that she has a cute little bookshelf and we put some plants on it and decorate it in fun ways for the seasons. And I have my series.”

Fair enough. I think we can all agree that books — and organizing them — are highly personal. Who has time to get cranky about someone else’s choice? With one exception: I draw the line at<b> </b>turning the spines toward the wall so the pages face out for a neutral Zoom backdrop. That’s just silly.

College of William and Mary, BA in English

Mari-Jane Williams edits home and garden features and other lifestyle content for The Washington Post. Previously, she wrote the House Calls column and edited for On Parenting, as well as handled community news for The Post’s Local Living and the Prince William and Loudoun Extras.

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Could a bibliophile learn to love books arranged by color?