Organizing my personal library

Because I have spent so much time in libraries, I have never given any conscious thought to how I organize my home library.  I just automatically organize it the way we do at work: fiction is sorted by author's name (last name then first name), except I then alphabetize by title for each author; non-fiction is sorted by the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system.  I know a lot of people don't understand how the DDC works but, in the simplest of terms, each subject has its own number.  Therefore, in even simpler terms, non-fiction is sorted by subject.  I then alphabetize by author within the subject.  To me, this seems the easiest way to organize any library.  Reading "Phantoms on the Bookshelves" by Jacques Bonnet (translated from the French by Sian Reynolds), he talks about how difficult it is to organize large personal libraries (his definition of 'large' being a collection of more than 1000 books), his own included.  Although my library is not large (almost 300), I can still imagine how easily I would be able to navigate my collection if I did have thousands of books.  This is because I easily navigate two such large collections every day at work.  Even if I don't know the exact DDC number for a specific title, I do know the general area it should be found and then I browse that area until I find what I'm looking for.

This is so much easier than Bonnet's arrangement by genre and sub-genre, with books being placed alphabetically within sections.  He has three main categories: literature; non-fiction; and the arts.  Literature is subdivided into languages.  Non-fiction has two main divisions: abstract (philosophy, theology, history of religions, science, psychology, literary criticism, linguistics, and literary history) and concrete (history, politics, anthropology, and biography).  The arts are subdivided by music, cinema, photography, painting and drawing, architecture, exhibition catalogues and art history that are then subdivided again.  His arrangement doesn't even work for him all the time:

"Sometimes I spend time looking for a book for which the logical place has been overtaken by events.  Or failing to find a book that I know I have somewhere.  Have I mis-shelved it or is it lost?  I cannot always answer that question, or else it is answered too late, when I have already bought another copy."

I know that I take my knowledge of DDC for granted.  I also know that I don't know it as well as I could; I still have to look things up.  Being responsible for cataloguing the collections of two different public libraries means that I've gotten a stronger sense of where specific topics are shelved.  And then I have my own collection which reflects my personal interests and subjects.  I know that my knowledge of DDC has been gained over almost ten years of working in public libraries.  I also know that library patrons generally have a vague idea of how DDC works.  I truly wish that all students were taught how to use DDC in elementary school and made to use it in all levels of education (elementary, secondary, and college/university) so that everyone in every generation could take DDC classification for granted like I do.

Read on,
Paula