Last time I shelved them, it was right after I had submitted my dissertation and we had moved to a new state, and I was still thinking of myself as a professional academic. This meant I had two libraries--my Serious Scholarly Library, and everything else (i.e. my "unserious" library).
Three and a half years later, this division made absolutely no sense, and my house was overrun with books I was probably never going to read again, certainly not in the foreseeable future.
The first thing I did was put all my secondary scholarly sources in a nice sturdy tote and put it in the attic. If I do start writing literary criticism again, it will have to be because I am fascinated or enamored by a particular story, not because I want to get into a fight with another academic.
The next thing I did was return to my old Brownsburg Public Library Mini-Page roots and sort everything into Fiction and Non-Fiction. (I admit I'm still not sure what to do with the texts that wobble on the border between those two categories, though--like Layamon's Brut and Geoffrey's Historia, for example, or any of the family sagas. For the time being I'm keeping them in fiction with Snorri's Edda, but I'm open to persuasion.)
Malory's Morte Darthur is just as fictional as Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave (and just as Arthurian) even if one got a whole dissertation chapter and the other was "just" a favorite in high school. And I took a particular delight in shelving my collection of Shakespeare plays with Ryan North's To Be Or Not To Be and Romeo and/or Juliet choose-your-own-adventures.
But the Non-Fiction section is especially magical. I paired books as though I were an elementary teacher trying to keep unruly students in line, or a first-year composition instructor arranging conference groups so that students would be encouraged to collaborate with representatives of diverse viewpoints. This means that St. Augustine, that notoriously misogynistic genius, has to sit with Rachel Naomi Remen and Kathleen Norris, two equally brilliant modern women who have a healthy respect for their own femininity (and expect others to do the same). John Calvin has to hang with Rob Bell (which makes me giggle every time I think of it). Less antagonistically, I put Margery Kempe with How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Everything you never wanted your kids to know about sex (but were afraid they'd ask) because someone with 14 children and a fraught relationship with her own sexuality probably could use the support.
I'm delighted with the conversations my books seem to be having with each other, now that I've removed the artificial barrier of "serious" and "non-serious." Turns out all my books can be taken seriously, but they can also all be taken too seriously.
Bonus: having my academic books out there with everything else means that it's easier for me to loan my Biography of the English Language to Queen Mab, who, I recently learned at Parent-Teacher Conferences, has been sharing all kinds of linguistic trivia during language lessons at school. It almost makes up for the toddler de-shelving everything onto the floor whenever he feels a bit destructive.
