Yesterday, The Girlfriend and I thoroughly rearranged our library due to receiving several matching bookshelves from a co-worker of hers who was in the process of moving. The result is frankly life-changing. All books are loose-packed, and there are still empty shelves available. The exact arrangement will probably be tweaked over time, but overall, I’m very pleased with it.
Several people on Twitter remarked on the color sort — that is indeed intentional, and it is limited to our contemporary novels, which we don’t refer to very often. The Girlfriend believes that books are decorative as well as utilitarian, so while she was out, I sorted this section by color to surprise her.
Now all that remains is to empty our her Minneapolis apartment, which includes a new larger bed and a couch. Then we will have officially (and very thoroughly) re-nested for the summer.
An und für sich 
I like the color coding, as it’s very eye-catching. Perhaps not as much, though, as the fact that the table is a horizontal door. Is there a resin over the surface of that door or do you just work around its contours?
This is a nice photo and all but you can’t just show us a picture of all your nicely organised books without explaining the underlying system you’ve used for ordering them.
We work with its contours, including the hardware. Normally we’re able to space guests out so as to avoid bruised elbows, etc.
Left — color-sorted are contemporary novels (top three shelves). Remainder are “classics” (arbitrarily chosen — mainly stuff I thought I might look at and so wanted to be able to find more easily), along with graphic novels.
Short shelf — beginning of theology section. First tall shelf — top level is my “self shelf” (my own books, journals and edited volumes I’ve appeared in), then the continuation of theology, followed by “miscellaneous other non-fiction” (history, art, music), then psychoanalysis, then a shelf of all Zizek and Agamben, and finally the beginning of philosophy. Second tall shelf — continuation of philosophy (for a few — this continues on an off-camera shelf, which I left alone because it was already the H-Z philosophy shelf), then untranslated literature, then poetry, and finally Church Dogmatics.
So maybe it looks more organized than it is?
In my office, there’s also a supplemental shelf with foreign-language dictionaries, Bible, history of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.