A Long Shelf Life

I am moving a bunch of books, VHS tapes, and DVDs from various spots around the house into their new homes in the living room. For the past few weeks, my ♥GF♥ and I have been fixing up the living room. It's now painted, has new curtains, and features a big-ass entertainment center that we inherited. I already had about 5 or 6 full-sized Wal-Mart bookshelves lining two walls plus a big homemade standup thing for my VHS tapes; The shelves have been moved around to make an "L"-shape to accomodate the entertainment center, and yesterday they got three younger siblings running along the portion of the living room wall underneath the side window. The standup thing is now awaiting its new assignment in the garage. All that's left is to get a couch and a fishtank.

Most of the books I have are in rough Dewey Decimal order. The living room is for geography and history (the 900s) and the book room (currently unwalkable-in) has all the fiction plus the 000s through 800s plus a bunch of other junk. It was totally impractical to keep the books in any order when we were moving them around to do the painting, so I have been devising my strategy to get them back how I want them in Living Room 2.0.

Also, I am trying to figure out how I want to get all these videos in order. Straight alpha is one option, though not the one I had been using before. I had had them semi-alpha by genre, though that was with the open-space of the standup thing. The shelves of the entertainment center only display a few; The rest will be accessible but not immediately visible. Do I want to let the whims of the alphabet decide which are shown, or do I want to make sure that my faves are out there for people to see?

I decided to keep aside a box two boxes of the tapes and DVDs that I have that I have either never watched at all, or that I want to finish watching, or that I want to watch again in light of a new perspective, or for which I have seen the film but still need to listen to the commentary. (Lots of Criterion Collection extras that I want to absorb; Also some good stuff I forgot I even had that I taped off of AMC before it went to shit.) Plus, a few giveaways. Anyone need a spare copy of Sonny Chiba's Legend of the Eight Samurai? (Sorry -- Pan & Scanned version.)