The Benefits of Organizing Your Books by Color

The standard bookshelf is organized by subject and/or author, but it’s far better to color-code. Consider the benefits:

People will know that you’re an aspiring food blogger without you having to tell them.
To fill in the missing colors, you will buy more books. This is bad for you fiscally, but good for the sinking publishing industry.

Once you complete a nice rainbow set, you will buy new books on Kindle. This is bad for the publishing industry, but good for Amazon. Did you hear that Jeff Bezos went to the moon? So neat!
Not all of your Harry Potter books will match, so visitors won’t be able to see immediately that you own so many copies of each volume that they could fill an entire shelf.

If you’re doing a crossword puzzle with an obscure color as a clue, your books will jog your memory. (Note: the answer is “opal.”)
If you feel like a change, you can always turn your books around for the spine-in, pages-out look, since you’ve already dropped the pretense that books are for reading.

You will finally learn to appreciate the color “millennial pink.”
If you want to read one of your books, you will visualize its cover art. When you can’t remember if it’s apricot or blush, you will locate it on Google, by title and author.

In the time that this takes, you will burn fourteen calories—ten more than before you reorganized!
You will realize that you have too many off-white books, so you’ll pull the ugliest ones to give away. On a whim, you will open one of them, “Walden,” by Henry David Thoreau.

You will read it. You will actually think about the things he’s saying. Wow! The inside of books can be cool, too—you would never have known!
You will realize that you don’t need the empty comforts of city life. You can enjoy the simple things. You must take to the woods!

You will sell all your possessions.
The Strand will pay you fourteen dollars for your two hundred and fifty-one books. Even the millennial-pink ones. The Uber to the Strand will cost sixteen dollars.
You will move to a remote cabin. As an act of self-reliance, you will print your own books, from memory. They will be bound in birch bark and organized by smell.

You will be much happier. It’s like J. K. Rowling once wrote: “Happiness can be found in the darkest of places, if only one remembers to smell for wolves.”
Even though you have never felt more at peace, the urge to check Instagram will suddenly seize you for the first time in months. You will log on and see that your friends have turned their books into TV stands. The TV stands will look chic as fuck. You will abandon your new life of simplicity and self-sufficiency, re-purchase your books from the Strand (for nine hundred and eighty-one dollars), and buy a new TV.