You could always sort them in いろは order! …wait, that actaully sounds kind of fun…
And I’m also a huge fan of cool book jackets! I love when there’s a secret second cover underneath with fun stuff. A couple of the https://learnnatively.com/series/b819949277/ manga covers have a すごろく board based on the story (which stretches across multiple books), and https://learnnatively.com/book/34a3821326/ has several self-referential cover jokes, such as volume 3 with a manga that features the previous volumes’ cover illustrations as characters.
This isn’t everything I own, but my mom happened across these in a thrift/antique/consignment shop in the next town over. SUPER weird place for them to end up. I asked the cashier about it and she told me that all of the anime/japanese stuff is brought in by one guy because his wife is japanese. Needless to say that I’ll be going to visit the shop more in the future.
Middle shelf: left side are grammar books including text and work books. Right hand side are book I have both in Japanese and English for the purpose of practicing translating.
Bottom shelf: Miscellaneous books on the right, left are blank notebooks and magazines. The book facing forward is something my teacher gave me when I visited Japan that he wrote.
二重螺旋 (series) | L24 (books 1-3) (actually, looking at it, I think I accidentally ordered them from 3 to 1…)
More details, more pictures
So I picked these up because the publisher is in full swing for their annual publisher birthday fair, and as a huge Flesh&Blood fan I’ve been keeping up with any new bonus stories released for it. Not only did F&B get a new short story, it also received a new “stand canvas” (a shikishi board, basically) with new art, so I super wanted to get those. Technically I could have bought them all secondhand, but where’s the fun in that? So I picked up some more books along the way.
Each book, when ordered from a participating retailer, comes with one stand canvas (randomly assigned) and one birthday fair pamphlet (you can pick which one you want). Manga and bunkos each have their own separate categories of canvases/pamphlets, and you can only receive that category of bonus if that’s the type of book you buy.
Here’s my picture of all my books + bonuses; pamphlets on the left, canvases in the middle, books on the right:
I picked up all 7 pamphlets because I could; the bottom four are the ones given to bunko orders and the top three to manga orders. The bottom four blue envelopes are bunko stand canvases, and the top three red ones are for manga.
The stand canvas envelopes were sealed, so I had to veeery carefully open them. Here’re my gacha results!
So as you can see I hit the jackpot! The canvas on the left in the middle row is my beloved Flesh&Blood. I wasn’t anticipating getting it at all, to be honest; I was planning ordering it from a secondhand site as I was opening them, haha. Not sure what I’m going to do with the rest of the canvases. They’re fairly small, at least, so I should be able to store them pretty easily.
I’ll have to organize my shelves so I can take a picture of them; my books are kind of all over the place right now. Augh, organizing’s a pain, though… (Also, I need more shelf space…)
I organize my Japanese books in manga by title and novels by title (ABC order rather than 五十音順 since I don’t know that well enough; I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but this doesn’t bother them somehow). My English books are by genre and then vibes a.k.a. however I feel like it, though I try to keep authors together. And those I go a little bit by size too so it’s easier when I gotta start stacking books on top.
I honestly never really had the interest/energy to organize my entire collection. I just stick the books that I think belong together together and put them wherever there’s room. Although my manga and light novels are kinda organized by publisher, it’s completely unintentional and I don’t bother with that for the rest of the books. I have more books than this but they’re mostly textbooks and scattered around randomly in my room somewhere.
I have no idea how to organise my books in Japanese yet but try to keep series in order and I’ve a shelf of books in a specific order I want to read them in but that’s about it.
I have more books on the way and I need to re-organise the ones I do have so that I can make space for the new ones on the way.
When I moved recently I arbitrarily decided to group my books by author but as I take away and add books I doubt that will stay. I suppose I also keep my hardcovers and paperbacks separate but that’s more due to height than anything else.
Also, books that I intend to donate (I’ve read and don’t care to keep basically) get moved off to a different space so when I’m ready I can just grab them and go.
I intend to donate some books and manga as well, except I don’t know where since there’s not much of a Japanese learning community around me. I suppose either the public library system or a college with a Japanese language program would be best, but I haven’t looked into it much yet.
I’m lucky to have a semi-large Japanese population near me between exchange students and Japanese companies, but I suspect libraries in any metro area would probably be happy to take gently used books in different languages since purchasing them is so pricey. The town I grew up in (around ~100k people, very few of which are Japanese people) has around 300 books in Japanese looking online.
I put a couple of books in an open library kinda thing as a trial and they were gone within a day. Might have been someone selling them on or something, but as long as they don’t get thrown away, I am ok with that. I will probably try contacting my local Japanese International School and see if they might want to add some of the books to their in-house library. I could probably sell them, but that’s so much work for a few euro…
Charity bookshops will probably take them too – they can always sell them on in the used market if they don’t have a market locally. (I found two of my favourite authors through “local charity shops in the UK happened to have a few books they’d been donated” lucky chance.)
Any advice on reliable parcel forwarding stuff (I suspect ‘cheap’ is not a factor here, but that would be great if possible…?) Looking to buy some used manga from Aus, probably just off amazon, and trying to figure out what amount of cheap-as-chips manga I need to buy before it actually becomes worth it…
Main ones I see floating are Tenso and WhiteRabbit.
Also for those who order physical media. I just went back to CDJapan after receiving an email that they lowered the shipping prices, and holy moly, they are now cheaper than AmazonJP and they do Customs/VAT for you!
Here’re my gacha results!
I wasn’t anticipating getting it at all, to be honest; I was planning ordering it from a secondhand site as I was opening them, haha. Not sure what I’m going to do with the rest of the canvases. 
They’re fairly small, at least, so I should be able to store them pretty easily.
