Can We Please Talk About Michelle Tam’s Beautiful Cookbook Organization?

published Sep 25, 2017
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(Image credit: Stephanie Russo)

How you choose to organize your cookbooks comes with a lot of questions. Do you go by author’s last name like in a book store? Do you organize by size? Or do you go by subject matter? It really depends on what you need and how many books you have! But I will tell you this: If you want to organize your books in the most beautiful way imaginable, then you should organize by color. Michelle Tam of Nom Nom Paleo fame is a stunning example of this theory.

A few years ago Kitchn looked into how Tam organized her Paleo pantry. “As an inveterate slob, I’m the last person who should be giving advice about organization,” Tam explains, and then says that her husband is the clean one in her home. The thing that stuck out to me most in the post was that Tam explained that even though she’s a messy cook, everything has a place in her kitchen (how Marie Kondo is that?), and that if she buys a new tool, she has to get rid of something else. So smart!

The exception to this rule, of course, is cookbooks. She keeps all her cookbooks. And the only way she is able to organize her cookbooks and actually know where they are is by organizing by color. When I saw that her cookbook organization had stayed the same for the last few years when interviewing her recently for another post, I had to pull it out and share.

I’m especially impressed by this organization trick because it looks beautiful even though you could technically say the bookshelf is also messy. Normally I hate bookshelves with books placed horizontally on top of the vertically stacked books, but it somehow works here because of the color scheme.

What do you think of Michelle Tam’s cookbook organization? How do you organize your cookbooks? Let us know in the comments!