Looking up from my computer chair, I have two shelves spanning eight feet of wall each, both packed closely with books. The top one is fiction, the lower one nonfiction.

And the fiction shelf is -much- more neatly organized and stacked than the nonfiction shelf is. Granted, they're grouped by subject, but I have books in front of books, books piled sideways on top of books, and so on and so on. Whereas the fiction shelf is two neat rows of paperbacks, and a couple of feet of trade paperbacks and graphic novels at one end.

It's probably something to do with the odd fact that nonfiction books are much more varied in size and shape - but then that's because I have pop-sci, history, pop-history, hardback dictionaries, academic texts, and a pile of turn-of-the-last-century small hardbacks (is there a word for the format, that size? It's close to A6, you know the ones I mean).

This was all brought to mind by http://www.bookslut.com/features/2005_06_005739.php and a comparison of the covers of two books about the covers of childrens' and adults' books.

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