How Do You Organize Your Cookbooks?

We're in the midst of a fairly large home project of which I'm beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel (floor tiling is happening as I'm typing this - finally.) The project has caused the disruption of most of my cookbook collection. Right now they are in piles in my sunroom, boxes in my garage, stacked on random shelves... When our basement is finished, I'll have a significant amount of built-in shelving as well as free-standing shelving units. I have about 500 cookbooks that I am looking forward to going through and putting into some sort of organization so that I can quickly find what I need. Problem is, I'm not sure what the best system would be. By topic? Although, I probably have a lot that don't fit into any one catagory. Frequency of use? Beyond my favorite 10 or so that starts to get fuzzy. Alphabetized - by author, or title? Of course, am I really going to remember who the author of "An Apple Harvest," or "Noodles the New Way" is? Anyone out there with a whole lot of cookbooks happy with how they've set them up? I'm wide open to suggestions (unless they involve the Dewey Decimal System. ) Thanks!

Hi,

Still think we have a thread on organizing cookbooks, but where is it???

I did find a post by gypsy boy on a website called "Library Thing."

Regards,

I group by cuisine type and subtype - meaning 'Asian' then 'Thai,' Chinese,' 'Vietnamese,' etc. - then by author, if the author has more than one work in my collection, e.g., 'French' > Pierre Franey, Jacques Pepin, etc. I don't keep the bios (Julia Child, James Beard, Jeremiah Tower, Gordon Ramsay, etc.) with the cookbooks, nor the books that are primarily essays (works by MFK Fisher, Waverly Root, etc.). I do one oddball thing - I have a lot of cookbooks specifically from restos in the Bay Area, and I put those all in one group (Zuni, Chez Panisse, Great Chefs of San Francisco, etc. Alice Waters last cookbook goes in this group, as well).

I don't bother alphabetizing in the categories and subcategories, though. There's only so anal you should get with this stuff.

I have three, three-shelf bookshelves in my dinette area (former kitchen before the addition).
Top Left: Ethnic, mostly grouped by category
Middle Left: Grilling, BBQ, etc.
Bottom Left: Miscellany (came with appliances, local cookbooks, etc.)
Top Middle: Party foods, appetizers and the like
Middle Middle: Everyday cookbooks (Joy of Cooking, Gourmet, America's Test Kitchen, etc.)
Bottom Middle: Celebrity Chefs and Famous Restaurants (the Frugal Gourmet, Mario Battali, French Laundry, Alinea, etc., althought 2 Bayless books are on the top left)
Top and Middle Right: Baking (breads, cakes, cookies, etc.)
Bottom Right: Borders' series cookbooks

Books do tend to migrate, especially on the middle bookshelf -- that and the top left is what gets the most action.

We have one 3 shelf bookcase in our kitchen and it is organized by whatever physical size fits on whatever shelf, but about 40 cookbooks reside there. They are loosely organized by type. BTW, my partner uses Library Thing to catalog and keep track of the other 8 bookcases in our house which now house 996 books and growing. She has one case yet to catalog at home and one in her office at work of books that she owns.

This is a big problem. I can't keep all my books and cook books in one place so they are scattered between my main floor, a room upstairs where there is a book case, and my basement where I have installed Elfa shelving on one wall.

I suggest you pick out the five or ten cook books you use the most and find a way to keep them near your kitchen. Then others you can put in another space. If you do have a basement please don't put your books near the floor!!! I lost books and records in past homes due to flooding. Elfa shelving is a good way to put up bookcases off the floor...they have it at the container store and it goes on sale periodically.

Actually I don't use cookbooks as much anymore except to read if I am interested. Most recipes I am looking for I can find on the internet, even many in cook books. I keep a small netbook near my kitchen that is wireless and I can look up anything quickly. If I save or get recipes on my computer, I never save them to my hard drive, I put them in a folder on my email account so they are out there on "cyberspace". I've lost a lot of recipes because a hard drive crashed. Or load them onto a memory stick.

I've never done this with cookbooks - I am forbidden from buying them - but we did go through our regular books - I found it quite easy to catalogue them by Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress, all you do is type the title and author into a library catalogue (depending on which your library uses) and it pops right up. I'm personally a fan of Dewey, because it does tend to categorize and subcategorize in browsing categories that make sense to me, and numerical order (even though it goes backwards and forwards because of the decimal) makes it easy to put books back correctly.

This is basically what Library Thing does, in a slightly less flexible manner. The main thing is to set up some kind of system that you understand so that it's easy for you to use.

Then, figure out what books you keep having to put back all the time and make a separate, handy shelf for those.

Thanks for all the replies! I think I will probably wind up setting them up by type and then sub-type, if necessary. I explored the Library Thing site and wound up signing up. I like the tag feature and the fact that you can edit in comments for your own private use. I'll use the tag feature to correspond with how I physically arrange my books and in the comments I can list my favorite recipes from each book, etc...

And, yes, this is probably way overly anal, but I actually find this sort of thing fun.

How To

Create Your Food Library: Cookbook Organization 101: Three food world pros share book cataloguing tips
As useful as the Internet can be for digging up obscure recipes or providing instant explanations of ingredients you've never heard of, cookbooks retain a special place in our hearts and on our shelves. "What you can find online is remarkable, but it's not the same as that well-loved, actual physical book that you have on your bookshelf in your apartment in Brooklyn, and before that Los Angeles, and before that, San Francisco," says Saveur editor-in-chief James Oseland. And as a cookbook lover who recently had to slash his own collection of nearly 1,000 books down by 70 percent, Oseland would certainly know.

I was surprised to realize I owned more cookbooks than this guy. Of course, he probably enjoys quite a library at work, which makes reducing his personal collection easier.

Regards,