All things cookbook care, management and organizational roundup

15 Comments

• JaneC  on  May 8, 2023

  I am the only one who organizes my cookbooks by date?

• wester  on  May 9, 2023

  @JaneC: wow, you can remember the date a book was published? Or the date you acquired it?

  There is another argument against organizing by color, which is also the reason adult Lego fans don’t organize by color once their collection reaches a certain size. It makes it more difficult to find the book even when you know what color to look for. If your books are arranged by anything but color, you can look at the shelf your book is located and quite easily find your book. But if you have a whole shelf of pink books, it is a lot harder to find a particular pink book because they look more similar.

• FuzzyChef  on  May 9, 2023

  My entree cooking books are organized geographically.

• EmilyR  on  May 9, 2023

  I also use a geographic approach followed by theme, but maxing out at around 500… I feel like it’s manageable and takes up 2 sizable shelves. I’m hoping to adopt a one in, one out system from here on out. Going to need a lot of luck on that front!

• Rinshin  on  May 9, 2023

  I use combination of geographically, subject matter, authors, and several shelves where I keep books I want to explore more after purchasing. I do the same with Japanese language books. I can always find a book within about 5 min searching. My magazines are by magazine names and chronologically.

• JaneC  on  May 9, 2023

  I’ve grouped my cookbooks by decade, not by the exact year a book was published. Other than a few late 19th century cookbooks, they date from the 1900s to 2020s. I estimate I have about 800 titles (including pamphlets like those beautiful baking powder pamphlets from the 1920s). I usually have a pretty good sense of what decade a book was published. If I need to scan all of the 1970s and 1980s that doesn’t take long.

• Jane  on  May 10, 2023

  If you feel so inclined, you can add your baking powder pamphlets to the Library, using the Member Added Books feature. Quite a few members have added these older pamphlets – eventually EYB could have a wonderful record of these pamphlets. Because of that we created a new category tag, Brand-related – you can see those tagged in the Library (go to the last pages of results for the oldest ones). There obviously are a lot more books/pamphlets that should have the tag added – if there are any in your own collection for which you would like the tag added, please email us details.

• tmjellicoe  on  May 10, 2023

  I’ve organized mine by size to maximize vertical shelf space.

• ThePatheticBaker  on  May 11, 2023

  Recently had the opportunity to re-organise my books. They were distributed in four places. Firstly the bookshelves in my kitchen. This has a collection of books that I and various other family members own. Also my various Levenger’s Circa-style disc bound recipe print outs. Secondly two piles of recent acquired book (Christmas presents and purchases) sitting on one corner of my kitchen worktop. Thirdly a pile of other recently acquired books on the floor of the family living room. Fourthly various books shelved on a series of bookcase elsewhere in the family living room.

  The reorganisation happened after delivery of a double-width (80cms) Billy bookcase for my study. This now houses all the books from the second, third, and fourth locations. They constitute my research/reference collection. Several different organisations exist. The primary one is book height with over-sized books on the bottom shelf — the tallest being Mélanie Dupois’ Patisserie: Master the Art of French Pastry — plus food “encyclopaedias” whereas the top shelf contains the shortest books — including my collection of the Bake It Better series from Great British Bake Off and the incomplete but expanding River Cottage Handbooks series. Intervening shelves are ordered in a quasi-thematic sequence with for example half a shelf given over the Great British Bake Off books that have accompanied each series. The half shelf immediately below has most of my books written by GBBO contestants. Other themes are regional baking including the excellent and wonderfully titled Oats in the North Wheat from the South by Regula Ysewijn (and her companion Belgian equivalent) And so it goes on. I know where the books are primarily because this new bookcase is beside me as I sit at my computer desk. A glance to my right and I can see them all.

  The first location (the kitchen bookshelves) remains unchanged. It contains the books I and the family use most regularly; Mary Berry cookbook, Peter Reinhart’s bread books Paul Hollywood bread and baking books; Delia Smith.

  There is a fifth location namely my Apple Books repository where I have a cooking “Collection”. It has all the ebooks I own but there is no real organisation to it as Apple Books lists the in either order of acquisition or date last opened. But there is some duplication amongst the title with printed copies. Sometimes it is easier to open the electronic copy that pull the printed edition off the shelf.

  This “system” works for me.

• mduncan  on  May 12, 2023

  After years of constantly rearranging my cookbooks to make them easier to locate I decided to do what libraries do and organize them by call number. Whenever I acquire a new book I add the title to an Excel spreadsheet, use my local library’s ‘search’ function or classify.oclc.org to look up the call number, sort the spreadsheet by call number, then place the book in the proper order on my shelf. I can usually find the book I’m looking for quickly but if I can’t, I just go to the Excel sheet to see the shelf it’s on.

• ellabee  on  May 13, 2023

  A simpler, cruder version of mduncan’s method is to have a Bookmark for each shelf. I’m seeking to keep my holdings down to what’s manageable w/o a more rigorous system, so my location Bookmarks are just ‘kitchen’ & ‘sitting room’. Within those shelves, books are grouped by general cookbooks, specialized books, & cuisines, with the cuisines organized roughly geographically.

• slimmer  on  May 27, 2023

  Like the author, I find organizing by color enough to make me scream. My 300-plus collection is mostly by topic: Italian, Asian, Cajun, seafood, veg, celebrity, 30-min/quickies, all-purpose. But then there are my binders, with recipes nicely stored in page protectors, some several to a page like a scrapbook: I have 8 or 10, mostly by main ingredient (chicken is my thickest), plus a couple of miscellaneous (random recipes I never got around to putting in their proper binders plus another of recipes waiting for related recipes to slip into the back side of the page protector). I look forward to retiring and finishing my organizing!

• valente347  on  June 9, 2023

  I too use a librarian approach. I organize by Library of Congress number which organizes them by subject. A few don’t have an LoC number, so I put them near others with similar subjects. A few have a strange number assignment, so I just put those near their peers regardless of their number.

• Rella  on  June 9, 2023

  I have a hall closet with all vegan books.
  However in one of my book rooms, I organize all the cook books by country. In another room, I have organized by baking, breads, etc. without specification as to country.

  I could never find a book without this way of organizing even though I have (as listed here on EYB) only 649 books – or is it 650 (hehehe) That extra one will not ‘break the bank.”

• sephina  on  January 6, 2024

  I use library call numbers as well based on the Dewey Decimal Classification with the help of LibraryThing. Growing up, I borrowed a lot of books from my local libraries, so I’ve gotten accustomed to finding books according to their topics and also relative to one another. I do this also because I shelve all non-fiction books, including cookbooks together.