Archive for ‘General’ Category
No Fooling–Fabulous, if Not Functional, Ways to Organize Your Books
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
Your eyes are not deceiving you, and this isn’t (exactly) an April Fool’s Day joke, though the joke’s on Paper Doll, because I never thought of anything so delicious. It’s a staircase. It’s a bookcase. It’s a STAIRBOOKCASE.
It’s fabulous, stylistically, isn’t it?
Paper Doll is drooling with envy. Books, DVDs and CDs, all neatly arranged in one snug space. For more information, or just an enlarged and truly dizzying view from the top (which the photo on the right fails to convey due to the bite-sized photo space we’ve got), check out DIY Maven’s blog the Amazing Staircase from Levitate Architecture in the UK, which learned about it from the amazing Apartment Therapy blog. Isn’t the web wonderful?
Indeed, in trying to research the more novel ways we might organize our books, beyond what even the most fabulous professional organizers might consider, I found some curiosities. Submitted for your review, if not exactly my approval, the growing artistic trend of organizing one’s book collection by COLOR as illustrated best in this photo but also here, and even this for children’s books.
OK, perhaps this is best thought of as an April Fool’s Day post, because coolness of style aside, there are serious impracticalities of both the gorgeous stairbookcase and especially the notion of organizing books by color.
Indeed, the stairbookcase has an advantage in that books are out of the path of direct sunlight, so they will be less likely to fade. It also has the advantage of built-in category delineation, such that each shelf is almost like one section of the Dewey Decimal catalog. Once books fill a full shelf, no more books for that category can go in unless some are let go. It’s a self-limiting system!
One might imagine, however, that unless one has socks-only house, the bookshelves, and therefore the books themselves, might be prone to getting more outside dirt, grime and dust on them. Also, books can be a source of pride and joy and how can you display your books with pride if you have to balance precariously and turn in a semi-circle in a phone-booth size area, to see what books you have?
As for the color-categorizing of books, it’s spectacular from an aesthetic perspective, but all of Paper Doll‘s faithful fans know that in the battle of form vs. function, Paper Doll will always side with Mr. Function (whom I like to imagine looks quite a bit like George Clooney). Without some kind of cataloging system, whether a low-tech card catalog, or an online digital indexing system like Library Thing, or indexing software like Book Collector, ReaderWare or Delicious Monster (for Mac users) or how would you ever find the book you want when you want it?
Pretty shelving, pretty arrangements? Pretty nifty. But Paper Doll is a book lover, and nothing would ever break my heart more than if I couldn’t find my copy of Pride & Prejudice
, The Eyre Affair or The Monster At the End of This Book the moment I wanted it.
And I’m sure Elizabeth Bennett, Thursday Next and Grover would feel the same way. No foolin’!
Paper Doll Post:
Book ’em, Danno! Organizing Your Beloved Books
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
This weekend, as I visited a beloved used bookstore and left with a few new (used) books, as well as extra cash and trade-on-account, I thought that Thoreau was right that books are, indeed, the inheritance of generations, but that doesn’t mean every book is fit to bequeath to our great, great grandchildren. (Novelizations of movies about Transformers, I’m talking about you! Diet books touting all-grapefruit menu plans? You, too!)
It’s hard to let go of books, but if we kept every book we bought over a lifetime, those of us who live on the second floor would soon collapse, and those with a lifetime of books on the first floor might be pushed, by force, all the way through to China.
Paper Doll is indeed a lover of books; the written word is my dearest companion. But even books, if left unrepentantly unorganized, become clutter. That way, madness lies.
I generally advise my clients that when they begin to get organized, they should consider some basic rules under the rubric of “Don’t put things down, put them away”. The rules are simple.
1) Everything should have a place to live.
If you’ve been reading organizing blogs, you already know that clutter is deferred decision making. You acquire a book (and you may even read it) but then don’t know what to do with it. You might pile it on your bedside table with the intention of reading it, but more likely, you’ve plopped it down atop any other stack of books in your kitchen, living room, bedroom or staircase.
When you make a conscious effort to determine where something should go, it forces you to make the decision if it even needs to be with you in the first place. Everything should have a place to live, but not everything has to live with you!
The Pareto Rule or 80/20 Rule says that 80% of success comes from 20% of the effort. This is why paring things down gives you a much bigger bang for your buck than you expect. You usually don’t miss the things you purge out (even though you anticipated you would) which was what blocked you from downsizing in the first place.
Not counting essential reference books (and yes, you should always have a dictionary and thesaurus nearby), the books you’re keeping (and likely tripping over) represent three aspects of your life:
NOW Books—These are the books that represent who you are now, TODAY!
They might be novels by authors you love (or whom you hope to come to love) and subjects you find compelling enough to actually read. For me, these would be my complete collection of Jane Austen (which I reread yearly, as Mr. Darcy is the closest some of us get to Mr. G. Clooney), new novels I’ll to read on my flights to the NAPO conference in April, guidebooks to online marketing and blogging…for just a few examples. Your own NOW books might be the latest thriller, some pretty gardening books and a biography you’re slowly but satisfactorily nibbling your way through. If these were library books instead of books in your personal collection, they’d be the ones you’d read hungrily and return on time.
Keep NOW books, but sort and maintain them well so you’ll be able to find them when you need them, and be able to identify easily when they’ve become THEN or SOMEDAY books.
THEN Books—These types of books represent who you used to be.
Subjects of THEN books might be parenting newborns, titles you read when your own children were small, but you’re now an empty-nester. My own THEN books cover all aspects of the television industry dating from when I was in graduate school and the days I was a television program director. The books are chock-full of facts that the Internet could now supply more quickly than I can amble to the book nook, but more importantly, they represent a time in my life when I needed and wanted that information. I no longer need to know the details of libel law court cases or how to calculate gross rating impressions. The books are like 9th grade lab assignments. They dutifully served their purpose, but the frog is dead.
THEN books are the ones that need to leave your home; they’re taking up space like guests who have overstayed their visits. The options for ridding your home of these overdue interlopers include:
- Sell books to brick & mortar used bookstores.
- Sell them via Amazon, Powell’s or any online bookstore’s used book section.
- Donate them to your library’s annual book sale.
- Donate to school libraries. Local elementary, middle, high school or even college libraries are often desperate for titles. Your house of worship and community group buildings may also be eager to accept book donations.
- Donate them to our hardworking military personnel or incarcerated persons seeking to improve their literacy.
- Set them free via Bookcrossing. (Check it out. It’s so cool!)
- Trade them (if you must acquire more) at PaperbackSwap or BookMooch.
- For more ideas, just type “donate books” into your favorite search engine.
SOMEDAY Books—These are the books representing who you wish (or once wished) to be someday.
SOMEDAY BOOKS are the literary equivalent of the exercise videos that gather dust next to the TV. They’re the guides to speaking Italian or Urdu that you bought in hopes of learning an exotic language, the cookbooks for cuisines that are too complicated, too fattening or too much fuss for you to approach in this lifetime…or the books on topics that represent your less realistic dreams. If you’ve decided that you’re starting a home-based business, books on writing business plans belong in your NOW collection; if you’ve been talking about starting a business for ten years but have never made any movement towards your goals, sell these books and let them fund a current dream.
2) Things should live with others like them.
3) Things should live where they’re used.
These two rules go together. If you’ve got books of all sort piled up without rhyme or reason, you’ll never be able to select the book you want when you need it or find a quote that escapes you. Instead, focus on these two rules—group like with like so that all your cookbooks are in one place, all your novels are grouped together, every book on personal finance can be found in the same place, and so on.
If you group similar subjects together, you need not worry that you lack a large library in which to corral them. The trick is to have mini-libraries, preferably on sturdy bookshelves with your tomes stacked vertically (for the health of the books and the functionality of your library).
Fiction is the easiest to organize, if you choose to do so at all. (You could just keep all fiction together and go no further!) Alphabetize by the last name of the authors and you’re done. If you’re really intent on the organizing process, you could organize books alphabetically by title within authors.
If you’re a budding librarian with disparate reading tastes, you could even have separate sub-sections by genre (romance, science fiction, mystery, etc.). However, alphabetizing authors and titles is objective and can be done quickly; it can even be delegated to older children and teens as part of their chores. Determining genres can be very subjective; even the Library of Congress has trouble with books that are mysteries and romances, or science fiction and mystery. Some books, like those by Jasper Fforde, defy category. Make it easy on yourself.
Non-fiction books are a little more complicated. As for a former page (i.e., library worker), I had to learn the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification systems for cataloging books. Unless you have a personal library that rivals those of most small towns, you won’t need anything quite so complex. Just sort your books by subject, generally, and perhaps by sub-section.
So, if you’re like my friend, Paul, who is partial to reading about war history (and explosions), you might have one sub-section for Revolutionary War history, one for Civil War history, one for each of the World wars, and so on. If you have an extensive cookbook collection, consider dividing them by ethnicity (Italian, Mexican) and/or by food or meal type (desserts, soups, etc.).
Children’s books can generally be divided by age groups: picture books, storybooks, chapter books and so on. If these are shelved separately, when your children age out of the toddler or pre-school books, you can select one or two favorites, toss the ones that have been gummed and chewed to dilapidation, and send the rest to live with someone else.
Next, once sorted, these mini-libraries should be organized where they’ll be used.
Thus, you might have a cabinet or shelf in or near your kitchen or pantry where you keep your cookbooks. It wouldn’t make sense to store your romance novels there (the concept of “heating up”, notwithstanding), but keeping the cookbooks near where you use them is logical.
Similarly, if you have a small collection of personal finance books, these would fit nicely on the shelf nearest the desk where you pay bills, research investments, complete your tax return and plan your financial future.
Children’s books are best suited to be kept in your kids’ rooms for bedtime reading or the family “library” if there is one; chances are low that kids will choose books over toys (except for use as truck ramps), so playrooms aren’t usually the best option for kids’ books.
4) Things should be arranged according to the rules of proximity and utility.
In general, if you should be using something all the time, whether it’s the dictionary, tax code, or moisturizer, keep it at your fingertips. These are the things that deserve PRIME REAL ESTATE on your desk or the bulletin board next to your phone or your bedside table. Conversely, if you can’t bring yourself to get rid of your THEN or SOMEDAY books, or if they’re the kind of NOW books that aren’t “now” in terms of your busy life, but will be this summer for your beach vacation, store them on higher shelves or out of your way.
Your bedside table is for true NOW books; the shelf next to your computer desk is perfect for the computer guides you reach for all the time; your desktop itself should probably only have a dictionary or a resource you grab all the time.
5) Know What’s Living Where!
Think of your books as people, and an index or catalog of your books as a census to know who (or what) lives where and with whom. The larger your book collection, the harder it may be to know exactly where a book is located (on your shelves or even lent out to a friend?) or whether you even own it anymore.
Over the next few posts, we’ll talk about easy ways to organize and catalog your library. You may be amazed at the creative ways to arrange them and the wide array of low- and high-tech methods available for making cataloging books as easy as the wave of a magic wand (or the wave of your book in front of your web cam).
Happy reading!
Paper Doll Post:
What’s Your “Receipt Receiver” Style?
All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
It starts the same for all of us: we make a transaction in the store, trading cash or credit for some goods or services, at the end of which we receive a receipt. At this point the two categories of humanity diverge.
For those of us who embrace organizing and the minutia of financial transactions, we carefully check the receipt for accuracy, note the exchange policy printed on the return, annoy the customers behind us with how slowly we are moving out of their way and then tuck the receipt neatly in the appropriate compartment of our wallet. Upon returning home, we put away our items and place our receipts in the pre-set location at which point we will diligently determine how long, for what purpose, and in what manner the receipts should be stored. Eek. We sound like drones. But organized, efficient drones.
Then, there’s the rest of the world. The individually unique and creative receipt-receivers have lives far too varied and interesting to stop to think about pesky receipts. Instead of considering the receipt as a valuable commodity, something that benefits the holders in terms of tangible proof for tax deductions, rebates, repairs, returns or exchanges, or the accuracy of a charge, the receipt recipients gives receipts all the love, care and attention one gives used chewing gum wrapped in tissue. They let the salespeople stick the receipts in their shopping bags, or they crumple the receipts in their palms as they stuff their gloved hands deep into their coat pockets, or they push the wrinkled receipts to the bottom of their purses to mingle with others of their kind. Eventually, receipts likely find themselves in piles on the microwave, atop the dresser drawers, or on a side table.
Yes, Mr. Tolstoy, these folks may lead dizzying lives of excitement, but they are startlingly similar in their approach to receipt clutter: grab, crumple, stuff, lose, bemoan!
The purpose of today’s post is not to sing the praises of minutia and diligence, nor to review last November’s post about which receipts should be kept and why. Instead, let’s look at the four main ways you can organize your receipts to suit your purposes.
No-Tech, No Expense–If you lead the simple life…
If you don’t have to create expense reports, are unlikely to have tax-deductible receipts and you aren’t tracking your expenses to create or maintain a budget, the most common reasons to keep your receipts (even temporarily) are to make sure your bank account or credit card was charged accurately and in case you later wish to repair, exchange or return your purchase. In most cases, your receipts will outlive their utility within 30-60 days, depending on how long your statements take to arrive (assuming you’re not checking accounts online) and the individual stores’ return policies.
If this is your situation, make your life as simple as possible:
- Empty your pockets, bags, purses and wallets each evening to make sure you have all of your receipts. Set an alarm on your cell phone or computer to remind you to do this until it becomes a habit.
- Toss receipts for cash experiences like fast food meals and non-returnable tangible items (unless you are tracking all expenses for your budget) .
- Gather the day’s receipts and put them on top of yesterday’s receipts in the basket or clip you’ve designated for this purpose, preferably at or near your bill-paying center. (If you’re persnickety like Paper Doll, put the receipts in reverse chronological order by timestamp, too. Chances are, however, only Paper Doll is this neurotic.)
- After the close of each month, put the receipts in a number 10 envelope, write the month and year on the envelope and keep the envelope handy until you’ve checked your bank and credit card statements against the receipts for accuracy. Keep the envelopes in a manila folder in the FINANCIAL section of your family files.
- Consider keeping big-ticket (furniture, electronics) receipts in a separate file. For more on financial filing, please see this post from last November.
No-tech, Minimal Expense–If you prefer a little more style or panache…
Keep your receipts someplace a bit more charming. First, follow steps 1-3 under the no-expense method above, but stow your receipts in a container designed for the purpose, the Receipt Keeper Shopping Wallet
or even a small poly accordion-file receipt-holder, the kind often used for coupons.
High-Tech, High Touch–If you need to carefully organize and analyze…
If you don’t just save receipts, but need them for budgeting, business and expense-tracking purposes, you’ll want to step things up a notch. High-tech organizing of receipts is dependent upon scanner hardware and scanning software. If you think you’d like dealing with scanning your receipts without any help from the experts and like figuring it all out on your own, just check out this OnlineOrganizing.com article on using scanners. Otherwise, some shortcuts may be in order.
You may have seen mention of the NeatReceipts Scanalizer 3.0 Professional Mobile Scanner
in magazines or online, and if you’ve traveled through many of our nation’s airports in the past few years, you may even have seen a live demonstration of how the hand-held scanner works.
Neat Receipts is only about the size of a three-hole punch, so it won’t take up much the valuable real estate on your desktop and can even fit in your suitcase. It may be small, but for do-it-yourselfers, particularly households that don’t want to invest in a huge, bulky scanner or professionals who need something flexible for use on the road, Neat Receipts has some cool features.
Basically, the little scanner and associated software allows you to scan each bill or receipt (and even business cards) and then by the same magic that CardScan figures out which words on a business card belong in which field of a contact management program (how does it DO that?), Neat Receipts not only scans but develops whole little categorized databases and reports. But the information doesn’t need to just sit there. Once you scan and organize your statements and expenses, you can then export the information to your spreadsheets (like Excel or Google’s free version), TurboTax, Quicken and QuickBooks. It’s even accepted by the IRS! And, for people like Paper Doll, it’s especially intriguing because it’s a hardware/software combo that’s Mac-compatible.
So, Neat Receipts is great if you like learning new software (though it seem easier than most, perhaps on par with learning iTunes). But what if you don’t want to deal with hardware or software, and like my friend mentioned at the start of this post, you just want it all to go awayyyyyyy?
High-Tech, Moderate Touch–You want cool software options, but know you won’t read the manual…
There’s a cutely-named option that’s getting a lot of buzz lately. So much buzz, bloggers have called it Netflix for receipts. So much buzz that I suspect an upcoming Paper Doll post will look at the features in depth. For now, though, I’m intrigued enough to consider Shoeboxed, and its associated service, Receipt Mail In, and urge you to see if it’s a good solution for you.
Shoeboxed itself is free and doesn’t require you to download any software. It lets scan in your paper receipts or take digital photos and upload them, or, and this is a really cool feature, lets you set up an email address with them such that the receipts for online purchases go directly to your account! The online Shoeboxed account then organizes your receipts into “shoeboxes” (like folders, but more whimsical) to sub-categorize your purchases. Thus far, it’s a lot like Neat Receipts except for specific functions of the software and the fact that your account being online lets you access it even when you’re away from your own computer.
But if you’re looking for the hands-off approach, peer into Shoeboxed.com’s Receipt Mail-In Program. It has a monthly charge, but it’s for those who really don’t want to deal with this stuff on their own. It’s also probably not for the light user, or the family who saves receipts for casual just-in-case use. But if you’re a solopreneur or an on-the-road professional, it seems like quite the time-saver. Once you sign up for an account, it works like this:
- Gather up all your receipts.
- Stuff them in a pre-paid envelope (along the lines used by Netflix).
- Shoeboxed scans and processes all your receipts and mails them back to you (in case you want to stuff a pillow with them).
- You get access to all of your categorized receipt/expense information in your account, online, ready for you to manipulate and sort as you prefer.
Someone else does all the work and you don’t have to sort, collate or date any of the information. No paper cuts. It’s not for everyone, but it’s a mighty cool idea.
We’ll return to this subject again after Tax Day. For now, make Paper Doll happy. (Consider it a belated birthday present.) Dig out all the crumpled receipts at the bottom of your winter coat’s deep pockets and from the floorboard of your car. C’mon. You know you’ll be glad you did.
Paper Doll Post:
À la recherche du temps perdu/Remembrance of Things Past
“I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.”
We lost an hour this past weekend. Actually, if you’re like most people, you lost more than an hour. First, there was the change to Daylight Savings Time, which thanks to a relatively recent Congressional mandate via the Energy Policy Act of 2005, came a month earlier than we’ve experienced in the past.
Then, you walked around your house, noticing you needed to re-set clocks that don’t automatically update, checking clocks that do automatically update (such as on your cell phone and caller ID) and then bemoaning that because of Congress’s change, all the devices that used to update automatically (computers, VCRs) no longer do so if they were produced before the new regulations.
Then, if you had not yet followed Paper Doll‘s advice here, you may have spent more time searching for the instruction manuals to re-set the clocks in the house, only to realize when you got in your car on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning that you needed to dig the auto manual out of the glove compartment to change that clock, too.
Indeed, just thinking about this may have made you stop in the middle of reprogramming the time on your computer to Google (as I did) about DST, pop over to Amazon to check out Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Savings Time by Michael Dowling, or read the fascinating blog post inspired by Downling’s book at The Dilettante’s Dilemma about how this inconvenience could be a huge conspiracy by the Golfing, Grilling and Candy-making Industrial Complex.
Then, amused enough to proceed with your weekend, if you followed the advice of wise people everywhere, you took this opportunity to remind yourself of the other things you should be doing on a twice-yearly schedule. Did you test the batteries in your smoke detector? Test your carbon monoxide detector? Run a household fire drill with your family?
Perhaps the next thing you knew, it was dinner time, and you’d failed to read and recycle your Sunday newspaper (which sits on your kitchen table, still), sort your papers (see, you knew Paper Doll would bring this around to her bailiwick), open your tickler file, pay your bills or do anything remotely productive.
At least I’m guessing that was the case at your house, too. Paper Doll bought a new shredder this weekend, and spent all that lost time reviewing and then shredding old bank statements, credit card statements and other no-longer necessary financial and personal papers. (Paper Doll is not yet self-actualized enough to shred old love letters.) Hopefully, you know the importance of shredding documents, but you may wonder why I chose a weekend already foreshortened to do it.
Well, Paper Doll has a birthday this week (not a big one, at least in terms of significance, though grocery baggers insist on calling me ma’am), and the end of a year always seems like a good time to shred, I mean shed, the insignificant items of the past and move forward.
Which brings us to today’s lesson, if there is one. We have to declutter the past from the present in order to make room for the future.
I’m not sure what Marcel Proust would think of today’s self-indulgent post (assuming he could even read idiomatic 21st century English), but as he’s the reigning (non-X-Files) expert on lost time, I hope he and the less retrospective (but far crankier) Robertson Davies don’t mind my taking their names in vain as I eat my cake and close out another year.
Here’s to another cycle around the sun (whether we “save” our daylight or not) and to reducing paper (and other) clutter!
Paper Doll Post:
Magazine Mayhem and Malaise
Two weeks ago, I confessed that yes, even Paper Doll is an avid collector of magazines, and how I combat the almost-inevitable build-up of magazine renewal cards and the insidious junk mail pile-up of disingenuous (OK, fibbing) magazine subscription departments. Then last week, we reviewed how the power of the potential knowledge implicit in our magazine collections make it so hard for us to let go of the glossy, fat bound issues as well as the clippings we’ve taken from them. As I said then,
I really hope you took my advice (and my confessed addiction to Reese’s Peanut Butter Easter Eggs) to heart and are on the way to internalizing the notion that merely possessing (but not using) dust-covered magazines (or exercise videos, or language tapes) will not actually make us more knowledgeable (or slender and ripped, or fluent in French). Thus, I really hope you’ve pared down your collections to the clippings or full issues that represent the bare minimum of what you already use or (being realistic with yourself) will use.
So today, let’s talk about how to store the magazines (or vital information clippings) that remain.
MAGAZINE CLIPPINGS
No-tech Solution–Welcome to the infinite wonders of three-ring binders. For those of you who clip just the essentials from your magazines, you can organize the material with a few three-ring binders, a box of sheet protectors and a few sets of notebook dividers.
To get an idea of how to use the 3-ring binder idea for clippings related to cooking, for example, you can revisit this previous Paper Doll post.
As a professional organizer, I find organizing inspiration and advice in just about all of those seventeen magazines (with the possible exception of Entertainment Weekly, which merely keeps me charming and sane). If I shlepped a whole magazine collection around in my trunk every time a client wanted help visualizing what a solution might look like, my car might bottom out. Instead, one lovely three-ring binder includes a wide variety of residential organizing categories/sections, including:
- Organizing tools
- Offices/Desks/Filing
- Bedrooms
- Living areas
- Kitchens
- Closets
- Pantries
- Utility rooms/Mudrooms
- Garages/Basements
- Organizing papers (yes, this category is often the inspiration for Paper Doll posts)
Other three-ring binders include web site URLs, articles and references for time management, life balance, identity theft, stress-relief, and a whole host of non-residential/non-business categories.
What kinds of categories of your clippings might you sort? How about gardening plans (sectioned by plant type or season), home remodeling dreams/plans (categorized by room), family health advice (sectioned by illness/wellness type, with grouped articles on topics such as nutrition, exercise, first aid, colds/flu, chronic illnesses specific to yourself/your family) or finances (with sections for articles on savings, investments, retirement, college-planning, etc.).
High-tech Solution–Are you on a first-name basis with your computer? Do you caress your Blackberry lovingly when you think others aren’t looking? If you own a scanner and are comfortable with technology, save and organize your vital clippings with a program like Scanalog.
While any scanning program would suffice, it’s in your interest to use a scanning program that actually indexes and catalogs the articles in question. Scanalog is designed specifically for scanning, categorizing and indexing articles and clippings to keep information organized. Once you scan in the articles, the system allows you to tag the information with either 11 pre-set categories and 102 pre-set sub-categories, or you can create your own, and the articles are condensed into teeny tiny JPEG format files. (How? Don’t ask Paper Doll. I’m still trying to figure out how photocopy machines work!)
MAGAZINES
Before you read further, I implore you to go back to last week’s post, discouraging you from keeping any but the current issues or truly favorite issues (such as holiday issues of Southern Living if you do a lot of entertaining at the holidays, or back-to-school issues of Seventeen Magazine if you’ve got adolescent daughters). That said, sure, you’re going to want to have a neat way to display magazines:
Zero expense, minimal style–If you have fewer than a half dozen magazines each month, and you are careful about tossing old issues when new ones arrive, it should suffice to fan the magazines out on the coffee table or keep one neat pile (with edges squared) on a side table in a common room. Do not let your family use the magazines as coasters.
Minimal expense, minimal style–If you want to store the current month’s magazines tidily, check your local Dollar Store (or regional alternative) for shallow, lightweight baskets, sans handles, for storage. The advantage of such shallow baskets is that you won’t be inclined to try to overstuff them. Of course, the disadvantage is that the titles will not be immediately viewable, as you’ll only be able to see the magazine on top.
An alternative is to check out the corrugated paper, plastic or mesh magazine holders common in retail stores like Target or Wal-Mart or office supply stores. These let you “file” your magazines so you can see the spines. However, magazine holders have a “permanent” feel about them, and your general goal is to keep most magazines only temporarily!
Moderate Expense, Maximum Style–If you’re the sort who always believes form must surpass function, then you’ll want to invest (either money or time) in magazine displays that delight you. If you’re the crafty type, acquire the aforementioned low-expense cardboard or plastic magazine boxes and decorate them to your heart’s content. Do people still do decoupage?
If, however, you are like Paper Doll and were sadly born with out the crafting gene, fear not. There are beautiful magazine file boxes available for displaying your current issues or saved collections neatly and attractively. At OnlineOrganizing.com, for example, you can find the nifty Blooming Bins Magazine Holders pictured below:
Pretty…and just in time for Spring!
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