The Case for the Chronological Bookshelf

A Visual Display of your Reading Life can Help You Remember What you Read

I love seeing how personal collectors, book lovers, bookstores, and libraries arrange their books. There are so many different organizational approaches. Most collections are arranged by genre or topic and further organized by author last name within those categories. Since starting the Books of Titans reading project in 2017, I’ve arranged my books chronologically in the order in which I read them.

This arrangement has had the unanticipated benefit of helping me remember what I read. If I look at a book on my shelf, I’m transported to that time period when I read the book. I see the books I read immediately before and after. Sometimes, I remember how those book pairings helped me notice ideas I would have otherwise missed.

Additionally, if I need to find a book on my bookshelves, my mind doesn’t first go to genre > author last name. Instead, I’m thinking of the time period when I read that book. I’m thinking of the year. Memories flood back to where I was living, major things happening at that point in my life, and other books I read around that time. It’s a completely different way of locating a book.

The photo above shows the books I read during Phase I of this reading project which took place over 6 years from 2017 - 2022. I’ve placed white lines at the dividing points between years. In 2023, I entered Phase II where I began reading The Immortal Books. I’m reading these in chronological order. Here is a photo from the first 3 years of this portion of the project:

The fun thing about placing The Immortal Books in chronological order is the ability to see how ideas have developed over time. In the photo above, I think about connections between Gilgamesh and the Hebrew Bible, between Homer and the Greek Tragedies, between the Greek Comedies and Plato.

There are some differences in these two photos. In the first photo, I have the books arranged by my reading order, but not chronologically in terms of when they were written. By reading The Immortal Books in chronological order, my second photo not only shows my reading order but the order in which each of these books were first written or collected (ex. Gilgamesh, Homer).

You may be reading the same books that everyone else is reading, but your reading order will be vastly different. By organizing your books chronologically in your reading order, your shelves will tell the unique story of your reading path and also help you to better visualize the books you’ve read over the years. For those of you who love to read multiples books at the same time, that may make this practice difficult. However, you can still batch books on your shelves that you’ve read around the same time.

This personal approach with my own books led directly to the way in which we organize The Great Wall at Landmark Booksellers. This is the only presentation of The Great Books in chronological order at a bookstore that I’m aware of. People love it. It really helps to highlight the development of ideas through time: