When I married my husband I married a man with many books. He is an avid reader and also very sentimental so he has kept pretty much every book he's ever read. Of course I didn't find The KonMari Method™ well into our marriage so I merchandised and contained them in bookcases as best I could. I organized by subject, author and by date of publication. I should have been a librarian since ordering books is right up my alley. When we moved from our suburban home to a city condo we did donate a few books but also got 3 additional bookcases to arrange his books in a more stylized way. (If I only knew then what I know now! Don't buy storage to store what you don't need!) But it worked for me and he was happy to still have his books as a part of his living space.
Fast forward a few years to where I found myself bit by the KonMari bug and our space was completely decluttered as a prerequisite of attending the KonMari Consultant training seminar. It is not permitted to declutter the belongings of another. But I have seen from my own and others experience that our partners and house mates will pick up on it and practice it in their own way at the time of their choosing.
Ever so slowly my husband began to part with some books and other forms of media. Even as recent as this weekend he ran down a new list of some items he would like to review and discard of when he's back from his latest travels. Those few items he has parted with gave me enough room and a big dose of inspiration to take the merchandising of our bookcases to the next level.
I have looked to Pinterest over the years for #pinspiration on how to style bookcases since I knew even back then that the books weren't going anywhere. One look I really loved was the wallpaper backed bookcases. That had to happen so I easily found and ordered the print I loved from @lowes_canada. Another common theme in my pinned ideas was a lot of layered frames at eye level, less focus on the books. This was super easy to achieve by with a trip to @ikeacanada and ordered some prints of places we've traveled to from @posterjack.
I was a bit worried about the wallpapering process but years of creating window displays has left me with a unique and adaptable skill set. The building of the bookcase layout was so much fun and I ventured away from my usual library ordering system. A bit of playing around and a scribbled sketch was all it took to come up with the right layout.
For the books I separated the hardcover from the paperbacks. I love a hardcover book, feel, look, smell, everything! To hide it in a ghastly cover is a bit of sin so I removed all the dustcovers. I then sorted the hardcovers by colour, but kept my paperbacks in the usual order and tightly grouped on the lower shelves. (In the photo they are facing backwards, but I can only subject my husband to so much merchandising so they are flipped back now).
Family photos and a few highly sentimental moments are displayed including my collection of "vintage" fashion magazines (is something from the early 90's vintage?) and my favourite china doll as been freed from her prison sentence served in a cardboard box.
Don't get discouraged, instead get inspire! If something is important to a loved one, embrace it, turn it into a beautiful positive. Keep the vision that you have for your space intact while honouring what the other person loves. You can't enjoy or love something when it's hidden in a book.
It's the great facelifts like these that become possible when you apply even just a bit of The KonMari Method™ and a whole lot of merchandising.