Library Label Holders (set of six)

They are some of the ideas that Steve describes in his book The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, and that he uses in his personal library.

1. Create a two-part library. Devote one portion to books you plan to read—what Steve calls your Library of Candidates. Reserve the other for the books you have read—your Living Library.

In Steve's home library, Candidates are on shelves that line one wall of his study. The books in his Living Library are on the facing wall and elsewhere in his home.

2. Cluster titles of comparable interest. Keep all candidate books on bird-watching together, for example. Even here, though, listen to your inner reading voice, with all its quirks. Do you keep all your novels on Venice in a fiction section, or should they live in a travel section? Perhaps you have enough books on Venice to claim their own section. Each method works.

3. Label your shelves. This time-honored tradition works as well in a home library as it does in public libraries. The label holders that we re-created from a 19th-century library catalog are easily adaptable for any library because they're so simple to customize and easy to move.

"The Library Label Holders slide underneath the first books on each topic. If you rearrange your shelves or add more labels, just move the holders to each topic's new starting point." Click here to download the template to create your own Library Labels.

Ah, but what should those labels say? They could all be traditional or totally idiosyncratic.

In his home library, Steve intersperses traditional labels with other titles of his own, including:

• Après Reading: a temporary holding shelf in his Living Library where Steve keeps a new book that he's just finished reading. He revisits the book two or three times over the course of a few weeks, immediately after reading it, to help him retain more of what he's read. Then he shelves it in his Living Library.
• For When I Go There: Candidate books that Steve has ready to leap off the shelf and go in his carry-on...for when he goes there. More than a dozen books set in the Florida Keys await long weekends. For longer treks, he has Robert Hughes's Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding; Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes, about the South Pacific of Captain Cook's day; and Paul Theroux's Pillars of Hercules: A Grand Tour of the Mediterranean.
• Books to Give: books he stocks up on to give away. They range from several for young people who are starting their careers to those for friends who have lost a family member.
• Maybe Later: books he's given up on for now, but may come back to someday. (As he reminds readers in his Little Guide, it's okay to give up on a book—even one that's supposed to be good.)

4. Keep empty space on your bookshelves so that your library can continue to grow as your interests do. Empty shelves are like a beckoning road ahead.

5. Optional: add a large floor pillow...for your dog. Makes a great footrest for when you choose a book from your (labeled) shelf, sit down in your favored chair, and read. Ahhhh. To quote Shakespeare (shelved under Classics): "My library was dukedom enough."