Sarah Crown of the Guardian has a question:

I'm caught on the horns of a dilemma, staring down the barrel - to mix my metaphors - of the quandary that faces every book owner following a mass-transference of the contents of their shelves. How to arrange my books in their new home?

Growing up, my parents had the kind of library that, at first, makes company think, "Wow, these people must read a lot."  Then, after taking a second look, the expression on their faces invariably turned to something more like, "Wow, these people have a problem."

We also moved around a lot, my father being in the military.  They used a fairly straightforward genre-based principle, employing massive, handmade bookcases that ensured the deciding factor in any future home buying would be uninterrupted wall space. 

Seriously, the phrase "uninterrupted wall space" is burned into my memory. It's the first thing I look for when I go to someone's apartment warming.  I'm diseased.

In my own meager collection, I've tried to use an almost completely alphabetical system--"towering hardbacks pressed up against slim volumes of poetry," as Crown puts it--with some minor exceptions for lit journals, criticism, and theory texts (ugh). 

Lately, though, I've been developing a system I describe as "protracted meta-stacking," but which to the lay eye must look an awful lot like "piling crap on the coffee table until its legs collapse."

Anyway, head over to the Guardian, where Crown's plea for advice has garnered about a zillion comments.