The Book Nerd’s Guide to Living Together

Welcome to the Book Nerd’s Guide to Life! Every other week, we convene in this safe place to discuss the unique challenges of life for people whose noses are always wedged in books. For past guides, click here.
It’s springtime, which means two things are in the air: allergens and love. The bees are starting to buzz. The birds are starting to chirp. The bunnies are getting ready to do what they do best. Meanwhile, you may be thinking about doing your own nesting.
Moving in together is a monumental moment in a relationship. It can also be fraught with complications, as you try to successfully merge two sets of habits—and two sets of stuff, so, so much stuff. Of course, you know as well as I do the only stuff that actually matters is your books. How do you combine two book collections? Well, it’s going to take some work, friends. Some painful work.
The Reaping
The first, most painful step in joining your bookshelves as one is culling the herd. When you’ve both got libraries that rival Alexandria’s, how do you get all your books to fit in one limited space? Even if you’re as wary of a shared bookcase as you are of a joint bank account, you’re still going to run into space issues—your collection alone barely fit in the place. The crucial thing to remember is, if your stack of unopened cookbooks is more important to you than the significant other who will soon share your home, you need to examine either your priorities or your relationship. One or the other is out of whack. But if you need a little nudge, take a look at some handy questions to ask yourself as you sort through your precious, precious books.
The Organizing
Once you’ve whittled your collected works down to something manageable, there’s still the little matter of how you’re going to sort them. Here’s where you learn things about your partner that it’s possible you didn’t know. In the same way that toothpaste-squeezing technique can put a strain on a romance, so too can book indexing, if not addressed early.
What’s the big deal? Well, before you both decided to merge your lives, did you remember to ask (or at least assess) how your partner organizes his or her books? Are you an alphabetizer, and is he someone who sorts by color? Do you like to separate your books by genre, while she prefers to group hers by size? Can you both agree on whether hardbacks and paperbacks should touch? If not, or if you don’t have the answer to these questions, then it’s time to have a long, hard talk.
The Upkeep
For the sake of argument, let’s say you’ve both done your due diligence in fact-finding, and you’ve now easily combined your book collections into one massive assembly. Time for the next problem: how do you manage two people bringing home stray books all the time? It has the potential to be painful—given the rate you accumulate reads yourself—but you’ve got to set up some ground rules.
For example:

• Rule No. 1: No new books once the coffee table has reached maximum capacity.
• Rule No. 2: If you can’t find the cat among the stacks, you’re both required to do an immediate book cleanse.
• Rule No. 3: If that book on the shelf can’t pass a white-glove test, no one’s ever going to read it and it needs to go.

The Unforeseen Trouble Spots
There are always surprises when two book nerds combine their forces. You’ll learn this the first time your partner takes a book into the bathroom and falls asleep reading. You’ll learn this when the love of your life dog-ears one of your books and it turns into an out-of-proportion fight. Or when you realize that, between the two of you, you have four copies of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy you only find out about when you bring home a fifth. Life’s funny that way; it’s almost stranger than fiction.