Bringing color into a living space isn’t just about painting the walls. It’s also about paying attention to the way the objects in a home relate to one another. A full spectrum of color resides on most bookshelves, but it takes a good eye to make an average shelf into a work of art.

If you’re really lucky, you can find a complete set of color-coded books at a thrift store. A few collections that come in a colorful series: Wallpaper’s City Guides, many of the old color-coded Penguin books, and World Book Editions. For inspiration, check out the Rainbow of Books Flickr Group.

by Chotda

How to Organize Your Bookshelves By Color

• Take everything off your shelf and separate books by color.
• Create color-coordinated piles and divide your piles into warm and cool colors.
• Arrange each set of books on the shelf by hue. For instance, line pale yellow books up next to darker yellow books, transitioning from yellow-orange into orange.
• If you’re really anal, you can create sleeves for your books and code them by color (fiction=yellow, textbooks=blue).

 
 
by Marcus Ramberg

Some argue that the color-coding system isn’t the best way to organize books, since it abandons alphabetical or genre ordering. But for visually-oriented people, color cataloging can be easier to use than other systems, as long as you remember a book by its cover.

by Steve Rhodes

by hinke

by dcfox

by Amodiovalerio Verde

Title by hey mr glen.