Tools to help physically arrange books on shelves.

New here, so apologies if this has been suggested before. And .. I may have got a bit carried away!

In some ideal world I would like a way to be able to describe what bookcases I have and then the system to suggest a 'best' physical layout considering my preferences. This is non-trivial, so perhaps start simple.

I have my newly entered book collection details - thank you, was painless - but now I want to physically arrange my books on my shelves. One thing that would help is knowing how WIDE a section will be - that is, how much physical shelf space I should be considering for each section. For example, if I want to arrange my fiction by author, how much shelf space will I need for my .. Pratchett, T. .. books? My non-fiction books are arranged by subject, so how much shelf space do I need for my music section?

The actual calculation is easy. For those books meeting the criteria and the width is known - just the sum of the width fields. For those that don't have a known width, an 'average book width' would be used. Also be nice to be able to add a percentage or a fixed length - to allow for expansion and wiggle room.

But can go further. If I could specify the width of my shelves, it would be possible to calculate the number of shelves I required. If I could specify how many shelves per bookcase I have, could calculate then number of bookcases required. (In practice, have more than one style/size of bookcase, so need to allow for this.)

Going further…
Suppose I could specify a list of (search) criteria and sub criteria against my collection – with the system always providing a ‘catch all’ criteria called ‘Others’ of books not meeting any criteria. For example…
-----Fiction
--------Primary language English
-----------Authors with surname starting ‘A’ to ‘M’
-----------Authors with surname starting ‘N’ to ‘Z’
-----Non-Fiction
--------Books with tag ‘History’
--------Books with tag ‘Computing’
--------Not 'History' AND not 'Computing'
-----Others
Now, for each criteria the system will be able to calculate shelf space – and an overall total requirements.

But going further…
Suppose I could specify a list of bookcase styles (width of shelf, number of shelves).
If I could now allocate a bookcase style against each criterion, now the calculation will also be how many bookcases of this style will I need and how much ‘free shelf space’ will be left.

But but but …Some of my books are oversized. They go to a separate low shelf and should not be included in width calculations. Ummm.

If you think these ideas have legs, I'll be happy to collaborate with others on a more formal specification and perhaps screen layouts.
BryTack

Depending on how you have things set up (collections, etc.) and depending on if YOU entered the sizes of your collection, you can use the charts and graphs section for sizing:
https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/physical

You could also put physical dimensions in a view, pull up your books by the selected tag/tag mash, export to excel and total out that way.

There are ways to do it without creating anything new.

I have combined some of your singletons.

>2 gilroy: Thanks for reply. As said new and learning.
Did find the 'Measurement Charts and Graphs' page but didn't find way to narrow the criteria of display, such as to non-fiction or by author. Whole collections results are a 'fun' read but does not help with problem. If there is a way narrow the criteria, could you point me in right direction.
Thank you.

>4 BryJo: As I said, it depends on how you have your library set up. Some people have their genres/topics as collections, so that concept works.

From the sounds of things, you'll need to use my second suggestion

You can add books with a certain tag to a collection in one go from your tags page. So, create measurements collection and put say all books tagged history in it and you can use charts and graphs for those then. (In your catalogue, click on 'tags' to go to tag page, then find the tag, click edit and add to collection. You can later remove them again the same way)

>5 gilroy: Thank you but ..
While I'm sure the way you describe to extract numeric data would work, hardly user friendly. Sure I could use the exported values in Excel to get the results I'm looking for but then again, could put my whole collection details in Excel and manipulate endlessly.
I'm new to LibraryThing and am struck by it's ease of use and friendliness. Was hopefully suggesting an idea that would fit well into LibraryThing and I hope others would find useful.
So will still be advocating for this idea.

>6 SandraArdnas: This looks like what I was missing. Thank you. Will give it a try as soon as I can. :-)

UPDATE: Oh, found the Power Edit button; so small but so powerful! Through this can add books to the ToBeMeasured collection and see all sorts of things information.

A rule of thumb will go a very long way. I triple shelve most of my paperbacks and that gives something like 150 pr shelf. (75 cm wide).

>9 bnielsen: Can see that would work well for paperbacks. I would suggest non-fiction are on average wider but with greater variance.
Think for now, or when I get around to starting, can see me drawing shelves on paper and allocating blocks of books of similar genre until I'm happy.
Thanks for the feed back.

>1 BryJo: I have actually done that using Excel, maybe 15 years ago.
The interest was to shelve the books according to Dewey rather than by order of acquisition. Mind you, there were over 2,500 books, and I kept 40 columns of information about each one of them, including all dimensions and weight.
It got to be that whenever I made a change, the computer got bogged down updating the calculations, but that was four operating systems ago. Once I re-shelved the books, I disabled all those formulas. But, I could tell you down to the sixteenth of an inch which books would fit on which shelf.
Had all the shelf widths of 19 bookcases mapped out, and once the books were correctly sorted, I could drag a location down that column, and when the shelf was full, a flag field changed colors, so I'd designate the next shelf label and continue. After that was all done, it took less than two hours to get the books in their proper order/

If you want more info on this, PM me and I'll help you get going. But at 3 a.m., I'm about to hit the sack.

>11 WholeHouseLibrary: Thank you for this.
Can well believe it was one of those projects that you start of thinking 'this won't take long' and when you lookup it's 3 in the morning!
Wanting to virtually arranging the books both in terms of order - e.g. fiction by author, non-fiction by subject - and then allocating shelf space is where I started from.
Yes, it can be done by external tools but I would have thought anyone with over a few hundred books and a few bookshelves, would have at least thought ... what the best way to do this? Hence, my suggestion of a page with tools that help this process.

Thank you for your kind offer of help but if I do go down that route - and in reality don't think I will - will find my own solution, after all 'this won't take long'!!
Bryan

>9 bnielsen: My guess would be that you could isolate paperbacks and (comics for my part) and maybe encyclopedias and then have something left that would make sense to take an average of, say 1.4 cm thickness. But again this is just using a rule of thumb. If you want it down to the sixteenth of an inch, >11 WholeHouseLibrary: has shown the way :-)

I don't find that my library stays the same size, and some sections change more than others.

>14 MarthaJeanne: A second-hand book shop near here use a system where new books are put onto a more or less random shelf and registered as room-section-shelf. This means that it is fairly easy to locate a book and fairly easy to place new books, even loads of them.

>15 bnielsen: Not so good for browsing related books, though.

We were on a library tour once of a library with closed stacks. They give each book a number based on height and then running numbers. Works well for them, and saves a lot on space, but not really practical at home.

>14 MarthaJeanne: True.. But got to start somewhere!

And .. books on bookshelves are a very good example of entropy in action! Order going to disorder!

Tools? How about a shoehorn?

I have a couple of caveats. As >2 gilroy: emphasises, I would measure your books yourself; a lot of measurements are inaccurate or may be accurate for a different edition or are the wrong way around.

And, as >14 MarthaJeanne: found, my library doesn't stay static (plus I can't get rid of books).

I recently reshelved my (fantasy/ sci fi collection of) books, having acquired new bookcases, and decided that the way to go, for me, was to divide the total width of my books (as measured by me, allowing a couple of extra mm or so per book for wiggle room) by total width of shelves. This made a blanket assumption that, whatever the thickness of individual books, there would be enough books on each shelf of varying thickness that it evens out (I hope that makes sense). I've kept all books by one author on the same shelf - or in a couple of cases, at least kept individual series together. This way, I still have space at the end of each shelf (and at least one spare shelf in each bookcase) for additional books. After all, there's a reason I'm on LibraryThing - I still anticipate more acquisitions.

Previously, when all my shelves were the same width, I just divided the total number of books by the total number of shelves. Much easier.

Best of luck with whatever method you go with.

I suspect that different authors have different average book thicknesses. At least on my shelves I can get a lot more books by Isaac Asimov in than books bt Jean Auel.

Yup! 12 Asimovs or 4 Auels.

>20 MarthaJeanne: And some start with doorstoppers and just get thicker as a series progresses :0)

Generally I have several authors on a shelf, so it works out for me.