After the class, Evelin and I spend a lot of time cleaning off the bookshelves downstairs. We have two tall bookcases in the basement (both of which had two rows of books on them, plus another stack on the floor next to one. And there's another short bookcase down there.
A little while ago, I'd promised Evelin that we could go through them, culling books that we don't need/want anymore. This is not easy for me to do, but we managed to put a bunch of books (rough estimate: seven or eight stacks, each about a meter high) to the side to take to a second-hand bookstore or something.
With everything off the shelves, Evelin decided we should try to organize everything, too. At one point (about three moves ago), I had my books pretty well categorized. I didn't use the LOC or Dewey decimal system or anything, but I knew that poetry was on one shelf, African history on another, etc.
Between various moves and blending Evelin's books and mine, that system went out the window, but now the downstairs stacks are more or less in groups. History, biography, linguistics and languages, American government, higher education, and mythology and folklore are wedged into one shelf; the other has fiction, drama and screenplays, poetry, travel, natural sciences, religion, philosophy, and essays. Things are subdivided to varying degrees on the shelves, too (e.g., Civil War, African, American (North, South, and Caribbean), European, East Asian, South and Central Asian, Australian, etc.)
Now there's the matter of the various shelves upstairs and the books that should be grouped with related subject matter in the basement ...
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